Whatever happened to wind energy?

I saw a Hawaiian Electric commercial on television last week which said something to the effect that ‘we need to reduce our need for imported oil’ in Hawaii.

Unless I’m mistaken, all the oil we use in our refineries in Hawaii is imported, and barring a huge deposit of oil found somewhere in the Hawaiian archipelago, we are unlikely to reduce our need for imported oil, despite the continued search for energy alternatives.

What energy alternatives do we have available? Solar energy sounds good since Hawaii has an abundance of, well, solar energy. Capturing that energy and converting it to anything more than running a water heater seems to be a technology challenge that has gone unanswered.

There’s thermal energy, using the heat from volcanoes on the Big Island. It sounded promising when gasoline was under $1.00 a gallon in Hawaii over 25 years ago. With oil prices four times what they were back then, thermal energy would seem more feasible.

There’s wave energy, though no one seems to have figured out how to convert that energy into something we can use in our cars.

Whatever happened to wind energy? I see a few windmills on Oahu and the Big Island, perhaps elsewhere. Whatever they’re doing to reduce the island’s dependency on imported oil doesn’t seem to have had much effect.

If energy conservation is the objective, there’s one sure-fire alternative that will meet the goal to reduce the amount of fossil fuel we use in Hawaii. Higher taxes. In England, the Brits pay about $9.00 for a gallon of gasoline. We pay less than $4.00 a gallon in Hawaii. The $5-difference is the amount of taxes they pay in England, Europe, Japan and elsewhere.

Higher taxes means fewer trips to the pump. Now, if we could just figure out a way to produce a solar-powered, hydrogen-powered hybrid automobile for the price of a Camry.