A wildfire of anti-American uprisings from Libya to the Philippines is not the Arab Spring we wanted. Samuel Huntington’s "Clash of Civilizations" is at our doorstep.
It’s a bad time for foreign policy, the First Amendment, the Internet and energy security. Hawaii, an isolated economy still 90 percent stuck on oil, is frighteningly vulnerable.
While officials, think tanks and candidates study the wildfire and weigh the risks of action against Iran, an allied armada gathered in the Strait of Hormuz hopes to head off an Iranian blockade. Thirty-five percent of the world’s oil goes through the Strait of Hormuz.
There’s plenty of tinder in the box. If the strait is blocked, the price and availability of oil will be affected worldwide. It’s naive to think that we will not be affected because we get most of our oil from Indonesia. In fact, we will suffer more because we don’t have alternative sources.
Hawaii has been working on clean energy for years, but we are hardly self-reliant. If we can’t get enough oil to run the generators and cars, our world will stop and help will be 2,500 miles away. It’ll be too late to catch up. We won’t like the result.
Photovoltaic users will be better off, at least during the day. With incentives, PV has doubled every year since 2008. Hawaii Electric Co. has relaxed the interconnect study requirement, and PV will more than double again this year. But PV is still less than 5 percent of the load, and oil still gives us most of the rest.
The transition to clean energy is the most profound economic transition in our lifetimes, but it isn’t going to happen unless we incentivize it.
The Legislature wants to cut back on solar tax credits next year, even though they are the most iconic of the energy incentives. This is not likely to make us more self-reliant.
The Lingle administration took apart Act 221 before the tech industry could reach critical mass, and the industry stopped short. If we do this for solar tax credits, we can expect a similar result in the solar industry. If government abandons an initiative, the market will, too. See the piece by Leslie Cole-Brooks that ran in the Sunday Star-Advertiser.
In the past year our initiative has somehow moved from Clean Energy to Cheap Energy. Instead of trying harder, we’ve capitulated to spend less. Will that make us self-reliant?
Complacency is never clever, but in a world roiling in oil politics, where oil could become unavailable any Tuesday, it’s seppuku. We need self-reliance now, not decades from now.
We watch as our energy security goes soft. Unthinking, we tolerate unjustified opposition to energy projects, often funded by outside interests. We lose our momentum.
Meanwhile, the low-sulfur fuel oil we buy has hovered at about $130 over the past year. This should warn us that the $100 days are over and we’re on our way to $150-plus. We’re boiling in it, like the frog.
Oil prices inexorably increase the heat in the pot, squeezing vitality out of our economy and our Clean Energy initiative. We blame the utility and the developers. We look for cheap fossil alternatives. We forget our codified goals, bounce from pillar to post and lose our way.
After wincing at electrical bills, we make a leap of logic to believe that renewables, not oil, are at fault. The news discards what we knew before. We forget our plan to make a plan, then find there is no plan.
How about this: Do energy permits and approvals quickly; design new and better tax credits; move ahead with Big Wind right now; take the glass ceiling off geothermal; approve agricultural biofuel; expand energy efficiency incentives; start on-bill financing already; generously support local energy R&D; replenish the electric vehicle incentives; beef up energy administration; encourage "Friends of Clean Energy" to work with anti-energy groups.
Today, local Clean Energy is our most important product. We are lucky to have the resources that can enable us to return to what these islands once were, a self-sufficient economy, at least for energy. We need to do that before we can’t.
The price is whatever it takes to avoid distraction. It will be a joy to redouble our efforts on a goal that will benefit everyone, preserve our environment, keep our islands together and set a new standard for the world to see. It’s a good price.
Or, we could all just stock up on cash and candles, fill the bathtub and take our chances.
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Jay Fidell, a longtime business lawyer, founded ThinkTech Hawaii, a digital media company that reports on Hawaii’s tech and energy sectors of the economy. Reach him at fidell@lava.net.
