Honolulu's Civil Beat came to the Big Island and interviewed Richard for this really good article on energy and Hawai‘i – and then today it was picked up by the Huffington Post. Wow.
HAMAKUA, BIG ISLAND — Lush green fields rise and dip through the rolling hills that stretch down to the deep blue of the Pacific Ocean. The verdant surroundings and tropical air suggest this farm could be one of countless others. So does the water that flows past leafy, green taro fields, stalks of corn that sway in the breeze and the sweet potato patch.
But the subtle, steady swooshing of the water signals how this farm is different. The water has been diverted from a mountain stream, down a 150-foot slope and into a small, blue shed where it sends blades spinning to generate electricity.
Yes, Hamakua Springs Country Farms has its own hydroelectric plant.
Farmer Richard Ha borrowed money to install the plant as part of a 19th-century solution to a very 21st century problem: sky-high energy rates….
Yesterday at the farm I had a meeting with all our workers. It was an update on where we have been and where we are going.
Where we’ve been
The price of oil has quadrupled in the last 10 years, and those who could pass on the cost did. Those who could not pass on the cost ended up paying more. Farmers are price takers, not price makers, so farmers’ costs increased more than their prices.
Anticipating higher electricity prices, we lobbied for and passed a law that the Department of Agriculture create a new farm loan program that farmers could use for renewable energy purposes. Then we started to design a hydroelectricity program to stabilize our electricity costs.
Where we are today
The hydroelectricity project is within weeks of completion. With the combination of a farm loan and a grant from the Department of Energy, we will stabilize our electricity price at 40 percent less than we pay today.
The pipe that transports the water appears to me like it will last for more than 100 years. After the loan is paid off, our electricity will be practically free for more than 60 years.
Where we are going
We are taking advantage of our resources – free water and stable electricity costs – by working with area farmers to help each other grow more food.
What kind of food? Responding to consumer demand, we want to
produce food with a wide variety of nutritional content, including protein, via aquaculture.
In order to be sustainable, the feed-based protein must be vegetation-based. And since the building block of protein is nitrogen, we are looking for an adequate nitrogen source. Unused, wasted electricity can be used to make ammonia, which is a nitrogen fertilizer and, like a battery, can be used to store energy.
What does the future
look like?
Other than stable electricity, which would help us, our serious
concern is the anti-GMO Bill 79. It seeks to ban any new biotech solutions to farmers’ problems on the Big Island. The result is that the rest of the counties and the nation would be able to use new tools for more successful farming, and the Big Island would not.
What would happen is that Big Island farmers would become
less competitive, which would put even more pressure on those already at the bottom of the pay scale. It would result in higher food costs, making consumers less able to support local farmers.
The folks pushing for the anti-GMO bill have not talked to farmers, and they have no clue that this bill would make Hawai‘i less food
secure. The bottom line is that food security involves farmers farming. If the farmers make money, the farmers will farm. If not, they will quit.
Another article about the farm’s new hydroelectric system just ran in Pacific Business News.
Hawaii’s Hamakua Springs farm turns to hydroelectric power
Big Island businessman Richard Ha has converted his Hamakua Springs Country Farm operations on the Big Island to a hydroelectric project that will feed excess energy to Hawaii Electric Light Co. under an agreement being finalized. Read the rest
We just received approval to connect our hydro project to HELCO's grid. We could not be happier!
We still need to work out the technical details. Normally, the Standard Interconnect does not allow the export of power back to the utility grid.
But we are not trying to get paid for the extra power. We want to save money by avoiding having to pay for special equipment.
The flume runs day and night and will generate twice as much electricity as we use. We want to give the excess to the grid, free-of-charge. Otherwise, it will be wasted – poho.
This event, connecting to the grid, is as momentous as deciding to move our farm to Pepe‘ekeo was many years ago. Plantations were closing down all over the state, and there were many options as for location. We could have moved to Waialua on O‘ahu. It would have been close to the market – O‘ahu.
But we made our final decision based on water. At Pepe‘ekeo, there were three streams and three springs. The water was free and it was going to be free for as long as we could see.
The other day Richard gave some of us a tour of Hamakua Springs Country Farms in Pepe‘ekeo, and its new hydroelectric plant, and wow. I hadn’t been out to the farm for awhile, and it was so interesting to ride around the 600 acres with Richard and see all that’s going on there these days.
Most of what I realized (again) that afternoon fell into two
broad categories: That Richard really is a master of seeing the big picture, and that everything he does is related to that big picture.
Hamakua Springs, which started out growing bananas and then expanded into growing the deliciously sweet hydroponic tomatoes we all know the farm for, has other crops as well.
These days there are farmers leasing small plots where they are growing taro, corn, ginger and sweet potato. These farmers’ products go to the Hamakua Springs packing house and Hamakua Springs distributes them, which speaks to Richard’s goal of providing a place for local farmers to farm, wherethere is water and packing and distribution already in place.
The water wasn’t running through there the day we were there because they’d had to temporarily “turn it off” – divert the water – in order to fix something, but we could see how the water from an old plantation flume now runs through the headworks and through a pipe and into the turbine, which is housed in a blue shipping container.
This is where the electricity is generated, and I was interested to see a lone electric pole standing there next to the system. End of the line! Or start of the line, really, as that’s where the electricity from the turbine is carried to. And from there, it works its way across the electric lines stretched between new poles reaching across the land.
He asked the children who were along with us for their ideas
about how to landscape around the hydroelectric area, and also where the water leaves the turbine to run out and rejoin the stream.
“We could do anything here,” he said, asking for thoughts, and
we all came up with numerous ideas, some fanciful. Trees and grass? A taro lo‘i? Maybe a picnic area, or a water flume ride or a demonstration garden or fishponds?
There are interesting plans for once the hydro system is operating, including a certified kitchen where local area producers can bring their products and create value-added goods.
Other plans include having some sort of demo of sustainable
farming, and perhaps ag-tourism ativities like walking trails going through the farm, and maybe even a B&B. “The basis of all tourism,” he said, “is sustainability.”
Hamakua Springs is also experimenting with growing mushrooms
now, and looking into several other possibilities for using its free
electricity.
As we stopped and looked at the streams we kept coming
across, which ran under the old plantation roads we drove upon, Richard made an observation that I found interesting. In the Hawaiian way, the land is thought of as following the streams down from mountain to sea. In traditional ways, paths generally ran up-and-down the hill, following the shape of the ahupua‘a.
“But look at the plantation roads,” he said, and he pointed
out how they run across the land, from stream to stream. The plantation way was the opposite. Not “wrong” – just different.
Richard has plans to plant bamboo on the south sides of the
streams, which will keep the water cool and keep out invasive species.
At the farm, they continue to experiment with raising
tilapia, which are in four blue pools next to the reservoir.
June with a full net
The pools are at different heights because they are using gravity to flow the water from one pool to the next, rather than a pump. Besides it being free, this oxygenates the water as it falls into the next pool. They are not raising the fish commercially at present, but give them to their workers.
Everything that Richard does is geared toward achieving the same goal, and that is to keep his farm economically viable and sustainable.
The hydroelectric system means saving thousands per month in
electric bills, and being able to expand into other products and activities. It means the farm stays in business and provides for the surrounding community. It means people have jobs.
This is the same reason why, on a bigger scale, Richard is working to bring more geothermal into the mix on the Big Island: to decrease the stranglehold that high electricity costs have over us, so the rubbah slippah folk have breathing room, so that we all have more disposable income – which will, in turn, drive our local economy and make our islands more competitive with the rest of the world, and our standard of living higher, comparably.
When he says “rubbah slippah folk,” Richard told me, he’s always thinking first about the farm’s workers.
This, by the way, is really a great overview of how Richard describes the “big picture.” It’s a TEDx talk he did awhile back (17 minutes). Really worth a look.
It was so interesting to see firsthand what is going on at the farm right now, and hear about the plans and the wheres and whyfors. Thank you, Richard, for a really interesting and insightful afternoon.
Our hydro is estimated to produce 74 kW of electricity on average, and we use half of that. The unused amount will go to the grid, free.
It will help to stabilize the grid, too. When there's a lot of rain and clouds are hiding the sun, the flume is still running. When there is a drought, the flume slows down and photovoltaic produces lots of electricity.
Foremost on my mind is that stabilizing our electricity costs will ultimately help our workers, as well as farmers in our area.
We had a lot of visitors one day last week. All, like us, were very excited about the possibilities surrounding ag and energy at the farm. Agriculture and energy are inextricably intertwined.
The visit was arranged by Matt Hamabata, Chief Executive Officer of the Kohala Center, of which I am a board member. He brought researchers from Cornell University, as well as representatives from UH Hilo and Kamehameha Schools.
From UH Hilo, Cam Muir and consultant Greg Chun. From Cornell, Max Zhang and Robert J. Thomas. Matt Hamabata from Kohala Center. From Kamehameha Schools, Mahealani Matsuzaki, Neil Hannahs, Giorgio Caldarone, Sydney Keliipuleole, Llewelyn Yee and Marissa Harman.
This reservoir supplies all the irrigation water for our vegetables. The water comes down from an intermittent stream. Soon, the water pumps that move the water and pressurize the lines will be electrified from the old plantation flume.
See the blue tanks in the distance? That’s a tilapia experiment, where we oxygenate the water by using falling water rather than electricity. This is another way to leverage the abundant water that falls on the farm: We get 2.3 billion gallons annually on our 600-acre farm.
Construction of the head works: connecting up the old part of the flume with the new part. (Left) James Channels, produce buyer for Foodland Supermarkets and (right) Kimo Pa, farm manager at Hamakua Springs.
We took them up to the head works, where the old part of the flume system joins up with the new. As we looked downslope, someone mentioned how amazing it is to think that the sugar people moved the sugar cane to the mill by portable wooden
flume structures that they moved from field to field. We were standing about three miles upstream of the sugar mill.
Next we went to the hydro turbine shack to see where the water we borrowed 150 feet upslope is returned to the flume after energy is extracted. From there, overhead lines take the electricity to our packing house.
The turbine before
The turbine after
We have a vision of lining the south side of the flume with native trees. Their shadows would fall across the flume and suppress invasive species at the same time.
Back at the packing house, I told them about diversifying our produce mix. A papaya farmer wants to work with us, producing and labeling non-GMO papayas. Also, I visited an organic farmer in Opihikao yesterday. He is interested in getting heat-sterilized coconut coir to use as media for his certified clean ginger seed business. I told him I will keep him in the loop.
Later, Laverne Omori, the new Research and Development Director, came by with County Energy Coordinator Will Rolston. Vincent Kimura, of the INNOVI group, was at the farm helping us install an ozone food sanitation system. The beauty of this system is that we won’t have to use chemicals for sanitation treatment.
The only thing left over will be plain water.
Here’s a “before” picture with some previous visitors, Claire Sullivan and Steve Carey from Whole Foods.
And this short video shows “after.”
We want to use the electricity we get from the river to help area farmers produce more food. The bottom-line, inescapable fact is that if the farmers make money, the farmers will farm.
Our hydro is all hooked up and we are ready to throw the switch.
HELCO is meeting with whoever they meet with on O‘ahu on Tuesday, and we will get instructions for the Standard Inter Connect. We cannot wait.
We will have stable and low-cost electricity. This will give us the ability to refrigerate and consolidate produce for area farmers. We plan to expand the number of farmers and type of crops growing on our land.
We are looking into growing portabello mushrooms, and are in the process of growing our first batch. When we get into commercial production, we will end up with compost and that will allow us to get into organic food production. The electricity we generate will help the controlled atmosphere and sterilizing process.
We are also in the process of getting into aquaponic fish production.
Our new hydroelectric system is almost ready to go.
We received a County permit to put a power line under the single lane County road, and that was finished several weeks ago. All the overhead lines are in place now.
All we need to do is hook up the ends and we will be generating electricity from the river.
Our vision is to use the electricity to help area farmers consolidate and ship their produce to market along with ours.
Our hydro project is an attempt to stabilize farmers’ costs. Farmers and food manufacturers here in Hawai‘i – where we use oil for more than 70 percent of our electricity generation, compared to the Mainland where they use oil to generate only 2 percent of their electricity – are at a disadvantage when it comes to importing food products.
Lots of veteran Big Island farmers are considering selling, instead of passing their farm on to the next generation. The quadrupling of energy costs in the last 10 years had been just too hard for them to adjust to.
Our farm uses approximately 30 kilowatts of electricity, and we will generate more than 70 kilowatts.
We’re asking people for ideas about what to do with the excess electricity. One idea is to cold treat temperate fruit and fool it to think it’s growing in Washington, sort of like what they did at NELHA. I that case, they ran cold water by temperate crops and gave them the cold treatment that way.
With every question that seems to stir up controversy (geothermal, the Thirty Meter Telescope [TMT], etc.), the way I see it is to ask: "What would Kamehameha (or the old Hawaiians) do?"
The old Hawaiians lived in harmony with what the land/sea provided them, making sure they took care of their resources and making sure they were not depleted.
Would the old Hawaiians bring oil from distant lands to meet their energy needs? Or would they take advantage of what the land and the gods provided them (geothermal, solar, wind, hydroelectric)?
The old Hawaiians were famous for their star-based navigational skills. If they had the chance to further understand the universe from the top of Mauna Kea, would they pass on that opportunity? Or would they take advantage of the privileged location they were given by the land/gods to learn more about the universe?
I think part of the problem is that people underestimate what the old Hawaiians would do in today's technologically advanced world, and many think that they would still live like they did prior to the arrival of Cook.
I don't think that is the case. They were incredible wise people from an environmental point of view. They understood that by living on an island their resources were extremely limited and that their environment was very delicate.
Because of modern-day technology, we tend to forget that. It's easy for us to go to the grocery store and buy tomatoes from California, peaches from Chile and Atlantic salmon. We turn on the switch and expect the light to come on, because we know that there will be a ship/plane coming over to deliver our goods; goods that were not produced here from the land.
People see geothermal or wind as an intrusion to the environment, but have no problem with burning fossil fuels that are brought in from thousands of miles away.
They worry about the impact that a geothermal well may have on the air quality, but never think about the consequences that an oil spill from a tanker would have on our corals and the life around them.
People see the TMT as an intrusion into sacred land (regardless of the telescopes already present) but fail to see the wonderful opportunities it will provide to local young future Hawaiian scientists to be in the lead of space exploration.
We can learn a lot from the ways of the past: An understanding of the real value of our local resources, and how delicate our environment is. Combining that understanding with advances in technology will lead the path to achieving, or at least to moving closer to becoming a sustainable community/culture.
Aloha.
Rodrigo Romo was a member of the second Biosphere 2 crew. He is currently VP of Engineering for Zeta Corporation, where he is involved in water conservation projects. He lives in Hilo with his family.
