The Next 100 MW Power Plant for Oahu

Gabriel El-Swaify, recent Masters graduate from the Department of Civil Engineering at UH-Manoa, describes his analysis leading to the best choice for "The Next 100 MW Power Plant on Oahu" that he conducted as part of his graduate study. I was the supervisor of this analysis.

Gabriel analyzed both renewable (e.g., wind) and traditional feedstock (e.g., coal) for power plants. He also accounted for land use (land acreage needed for the plant and its accessories) and long term maintenance as well as stand-by power requirements when renewable sources are not available.

Waste-to-energy and Geothermal power plants are among the best choices as explained in this installment of my O'lelo show PANOS 2050: Solutions for a Sustainable Hawaii.

Honolulu Recycling Guide

The proper way to recycle household solid wastes in Honolulu is explained in this installment of my O'lelo show PANOS 2050: Solutions for a Sustainable Hawaii.

This subject was also covered in a pictorial guide a few months ago in this blog.

Big Rooftop Solar Panels Make Sense in Hawaii - Without Any Subsidies!

Question: Does $150,000 installed cost for approximately 45 KW make sense?

Answer: Yes, but only in Honolulu.

Explanation: There’s a lot involved, so off to Hawaii Reporter for the full article.

Improving Hawaii's Energy and Transportation Structures

Late February 2013 interviews with Hawaii Reporter's Malia Zimmerman:

• Dr. Panos Prevedouros: Improving Hawaii's Energy and Transportation Structures

• Former Hawaii Ben Cayetano talks about politics and economy 

Honolulu’s Poor Economic Growth and What to Do about It

The Brookings Institution, rated No. 1 think tank in the world, published the Global Metro Monitor update which “provides economic growth data.” Where does Honolulu rank among 300 cities? It ranks 284th for the 1993 to 2007 period, and 217th for the 2007 to 2011 period. Honolulu ranks 54th in terms of population in the U.S.

While Honolulu ranks 284th, for the same period Portland ranks 93rd, Tucson ranks 100th, Tampa ranks 106th, Salt Lake City ranks 130th and depressed Cincinnati ranks 206th. Honolulu is much closer to 297th ranked New Orleans than any of its peer cities.

Why is Honolulu ranking so low? In large part because of the excessive waste of funds on unproductive endeavors. Unfortunately, this is a lesson that has not been learned. Here is a list of 10 large mistakes:

1. We invested in the 2nd city and more housing. As a result we get worse congestion and continuously escalating housing prices because of land controls. Creating a 100,000 population city on prime agricultural land is a mistake that Honolulu county will be paying for, for centuries.

2. We invested in buses: 200 more buses, express buses, and HandiVan in the last 30 years. Yet we got flat ridership. In 1980 Honolulu had 760,000 residents and TheBus carried 71.6 million trips, or 7.5 trips per resident per month. In 2010 Honolulu had 960,000 residents and TheBus carried 73 million trips, or 6.4 trips per resident per month, a 15% drop in per capita productivity. Transit is a declining business.

3. The last thing we need is a multi‐billion dollar investment in transit. But that’s a local priority!

4. We invested in high-occupancy and zipper lanes but we don’t do anything to manage the flow on them.  As a result drive alone and carpool share was 81% in 1990 and 81% in 2012. More people drive alone now than 20 years ago, despite the tripling of fuel prices. Carpooling has lost share because the freeway HOV lanes provide a low travel time benefit.

5. We invest in government. As a result we get over-regulation and slow innovation. Many government operations in Hawaii still use carbon copying and physical walking of papers from place to place, then pay extra workers to enter the information on a computer.

6. A private consortium launched the Superferry. The supermajority of people loved it.  Corporatist politicians and special interests killed it.

7. We invest in junk renewables like concentrated solar. Taxpayers paid millions in tax credits to a company on the Big Island that installed 1,008 panels on four acres of land to produce 0.1 MW which is mostly used internally and no power is sold to HELCO!

8. We do not invest much in tourism, infrastructure upkeep, congestion relief and park cleanliness. Despite the brouhaha about our banner 2012 year for tourism, the fact is that growth in tourism has not kept up with Honolulu’s modest growth in population: In 1990 we had about 8 visitors per local resident. In 2010 we had 7.25 visitors per local resident. Taxes generated from tourists do not keep up with local needs for services on a per capita basis.

9. Now we want to invest in "one iPad for each public school student" as if Apple can stuff knowledge in pupils’ brains.

10. We also want to invest in one super-casino so we can collect voluntary money losses from gamblers. We seem to know how to get from 284th to 300th.

What if we wanted to improve our ranking (and our quality of life)?

First we need to place our trust on data and not on “visionaries.” Given Hawaii’s great loss in Congressional seniority, an economic decline followed by bumpy stability will be the trend as I explained previously. Honolulu’s basic 0.5% annual growth will be flattened by local, national and international pressures.

Then proceed with this sample half dozen of economically productive actions:

1. Plans focused on growth for Oahu must be abandoned.
2. Top Priority: Maintain, Rehabilitate, Replace, Modernize.
3 Scrap rail. Use $3 billion to fix roads and add express lanes and urban underpasses.
4. Scrap wind. Focus on natural gas, waste‐to‐energy and geothermal.
5. Scrap the EPA agreement for secondary sewage treatment. (Many cities are taking EPA to task for its unreasonable consent decrees.) Focus on accelerated replacement of water and sewer lines.
6. Manage current and future budgets to sustain item 2.

[Also published in Hawaii Reporter.]

Poop Powers Zoom Zoom!

Furthering the efforts of recycling, re-use and sustainability, Bristol, UK water and sewer company has developed infrastructure to produce methane-based biogas from sewage waste, clean it from its high content of CO2 and fuel cars with it.

 Remarkably, they claim that... poop from 70 homes can power this Bug for 10,000 miles!

Compressed Natural Gas is not new as a fuel for vehicles. Just to name a few, Athens, Rome, Seattle-Tacoma and Seoul use GNG in all or most of their public transit bus fleets.  Australia has tens of thousands of private cars powered by CNG or LPG, which is liquefied petroleum gas.

The main sources are, as their name implies, Natural Gas and Petroleum Gas. A third source of methane is organic matter decomposition (which actually created natural gas in the strata of the earth over the millennia.)

Renewable sources of organic matter include biomass, food waste and ... poop. Sludge, the accumulation of solids at waste treatment plants, is often problematic even for cities like Honolulu which has two Waste-to-Energy facilities, so it typically up in the landfill. (Honolulu had a contract to develop fertilized pellets from it, but the venture was not successful.)

The dumping of thousands of tons of sludge is, of course, a lose-lose situation because of the loss of land and the loss of an energy source at the same time. Bristol's Wessex Water has developed and biogas and demonstrated the Bio-Bug, which other than a simple modification to the fuel supply and storage system remains a conventional Bug with the original engine (and in most similar applications the car is switchable on-the-fly between gasoline and methane/propane/butane.)

Where is Hawaii Transportation Headed?

Remarks to the Hawaii Venture Capital Association and ThinkTech Transportation Panel, Plaza Club, February 28, 2013.

Aloha and thank you for the opportunity to present you my take on the future of transportation in Hawaii.

• Honolulu has among the nation's worst quality roads.
• Honolulu has among the worst traffic congestion particularly among peer cities.
• Hawaii has among the highest rates for drunken driving.

To solve all these highway related problems, Honolulu ordered a 5 billion dollar train.

The unquestionable and predictable result is that all these problems will get far worse by the time the train is installed. And by that time Honolulu will be short on transportation funds.

With less funding, there is no doubt that the congestion, maintenance and safety problems will get even worse.

In December 2007 Hawaii got the private Superferry. This was a means to get bulky items, equipment and vehicles between islands in 3 to 6 hours instead of 3 to 6 days. However, Hawaii did its best to preserve its way of moving bulky items, equipment and vehicles between the islands in 3 to 6 days.  A key supporter of the Superferry's execution is now Hawaii’s Representative in Congress.

Hawaii is probably the most oil dependent place on earth. Sure many Greek and other small islands depend on diesel generators to make power but their winter population is usually 1,000 to 10,000 people. Here we have 1.5 million people in the middle of the Pacific and we are about 80% dependent on oil and its volatile pricing.

Instead of investing in solid alternatives like coal, natural gas, trash and geothermal, we are now approaching the waste of one half billion dollars on flaky wind and solar.

Worse yet, we are extremely fuel dependent for land, air and sea transportation. Smart government should have found means to develop gobbles of cheap electricity so that we can extract fuels from algae and biomass to fuel vehicles, boats and airplanes.

But our flaky government is concerned with plastic bags and shortcuts to development, like the PLDC. And we are losing the Tesoro refinery.

The Tesoro plant used to make asphalt, but county and state government wouldn’t commit to a schedule of road repairs. So about 10 years ago Tesoro stopped making cheap asphalt. So now we need to bring it in and store it.

Hawaii government promotes EVs by making expensive, anti-business mandatory parking and charging regulations. At the same time Hawaii offers EV buyers the highest electricity rates in the nation, to punish EVs as much as possible.

The cost of power in Hawaii is three times the US average. So the 90 MPGe Nissan Leaf is 30 MPGe in Hawaii. Do you know how many conventional cars you can buy that deliver 30 mpg or more, and have a much lower price, and require no subsidy like the five grand we dole out for each EV?

And answer me this. Why are we even promoting EVs when 90% of our electricity comes from oil and coal? Each EV that clocks about 50 miles per day consumes as much electricity as a modest house with 4 people. Isn't this a fake and indeed disastrous oil independence policy?

Again thanks to our silly renewable mandates the KWh rates will only go up, so we will get less power, less reliability, and higher rates.

What's the future of transportation in Hawaii you ask?  In the past quarter century, transportation (except for TheBus,) public education and energy performance in Hawaii have ranked in the bottom half in the US or very near the bottom. I expect that this level of poor performance will get worse.

Although there are great alternatives, Hawaii is actively burying its potential for a bright future. Cost-effective decision making, long term sustainability planning, and accountability with stiff penalties are all absent. And so is our chance for improvement.

Mahalo!

Hawaii Over The Past 20 Years: Minimal Change, Minimal Growth. What Should Hawaii Plan For?

Annual U.S. Bureau of the Census data strongly suggest that Hawaii, and Oahu in particular, are stable communities with very mild growth and change particularly after the turn of the millennium.

The data suggests that mega-projects such as rail and "big wind", and mega-developments such as Ho'opili and Koa Ridge are ill conceived and unnecessary.

This slideshow provides both data evidence and brief discussion.

Politicians have engaged in biased or data-free decision making for decades. The mounting debts are sufficient proof that ignoring the trends and serially engaging in unproductive activities simply digs a deeper hole. Both Hawaii and the US are approaching the danger of the hole walls caving in and burying them, much like the PIIGS* and other countries.

What should Hawaii do in the next two decades?  The last slide provides the answer. In three sentences:

• Decline followed by stability will be the trend.
• Send “visions” and mega-projects to the cemetery.
• Maintain, Replace, Modernize should be Priority 1.

(*) Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain

New 3-Cylinder Ford Engine Delivers 47 mpg!

Alan Mulally is the venerable engineer and project manager of the Boeing 777 and for several years now CEO of Ford Motor Company. Why is he kissing this new engine?

Because this super-efficient, well-balanced and light weight engine can deliver 47 mpg in a Ford Focus compact car without the complexity and price penalty of hybrid technology. Many manufacturers are now turning to 3-cylinder engines for their smaller cars but also prepare editions that match the output of common V6 engines for larger vehicles.

These smaller engines would have huge benefits for the world market, and China in particular, where Volkswagen announced plans to build its 7th plant, just a few days after Ford had said it would build its 5th.

This is good news for mobility and the planet. Smart policies* and smart engineers get the job done: Mini engines with normal performance and mini consumption and air pollution. And fewer resources used to make those engines enhances long term sustainability.

Note (*): America's new emission standards require car manufacturers to achieve a fleet average of 34.1 mpg by 2016 and 54.6 mpg by 2025.

Old Tires into New Roads: Save Cost and Cut Noise

Engineers are designing quieter streets by adding rubber “crumbs”, reclaimed from shredded tires, to the bitumen and crushed stone used to make asphalt.

Enough tires are recycled in America each year to produce 20,000 lane-miles of road pavement mix, enough to re-pave about 0.5% of America's roads, according to Liberty Tire Recycling, a Pittsburgh firm that handles around a third of America's recycled tires.(1)

It is now possible to make rubberized asphalt less expensively than the traditional sort because rubber can partially replace bitumen, the binding agent used to hold the crushed stones together in ordinary asphalt. Bitumen is derived from oil, which means its price has risen over the past decade alongside that of crude oil. (1)

Discarded tires are cheap and are likely to get cheaper. In rich countries, around one tire is thrown away per person per year. (1)

In Hawaii we burn tires at the AES coal plant. This is much better than dumping them in a landfill or wasting fuel to send them out of state. But we should be making new roads with them.

(1) The Economist, When the rubber hits the road, June 2012.

Hawaiian Island Sustainability

How can we tell if an island is sustainable or not? All islands are net importers, meaning residents depend on external resources to survive, so they tend to be less sustainable compared to a self-sufficient continent.
To get a handle on island sustainability, a UH study group developed a database of 52 islands with populations in excess of 50,000.

With a sustainability score of 300 being “very good” and a score of 30 being “very bad,” Oahu scores 140 and Maui scores 180. The Big Island scores 170 and can improve to 200 with all-geothermal power. Overall, Hawaii’s population-adjusted score is exactly average at 150, so its sustainability profile has a lot of room for improvement.

Read full article in Honolulu Weekly.

Transportation Seminars in Nepal and Korea

I'll be giving a total of eight seminars in Nepal and Korea in the second part of April, 2012.

The seminar series in Nepal is on

• Transportation Planning: Practice and Problems

Then in South Korea I visit and lecture at three universities as follows:

April 25 at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

• TRANSPORTATION & ENERGY: Fundamentals and Comparisons

April 26 at Ajou University

• URBAN TRANSPORTATION FOR LARGE CITIES (Population 500,000 to 2,500,000) -- BRT, HOT, CS, EV and … BTU

April 27 at Korea University

• TRANSPORTATION SUSTAINABILITY ANALYSIS

Sustainable Development is an Oxymoron

On March 2, 1972, a team of experts from MIT presented a groundbreaking report called The Limits to Growth. Read more in the Smithsonian Magazine.

More recently, Australian physicist Graham Turner of CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems shows how actual data from 1970 to 2000 almost exactly matches predictions set forth in the “business-as-usual” scenario presented in The Limits to Growth.


Looking at the thick line updates of the 1972 trends, I find the energy trend alarming. The rest of the trends do no seem to be as alarming as originally forecast in 1972. Significantly, the population growth in China is under substantial control. But growth in China, Brazil and Nigeria counterbalance the population reduction of China.

The retired MIT professor who led the original study had this to say:

• Sustainable development: I consider to be an oxymoron actually...
• Predicting a global collapse ... is like being in San Francisco and knowing that there is going to be an earthquake and that it is going to cause buildings to fall down. Which buildings are going to fall down, and where are they going to fall? We just don’t have any way of understanding that.
• You can for a brief period spend more out of your bank account than you save, if you have come through a long period of thrift. But eventually, of course, you bring your bank account back down to zero and you’re stuck. That is exactly what is happening to us on the globe. We are living off the savings of biodiversity, fossil fuel accumulation, agricultural soil buildup and groundwater accumulation, and when we have spent them, we will be back down to the annual income.
• In 1998 we had the dot-com bubble bust. In 2008 we had the housing bubble bust. Both illustrated what incredibly primitive understanding and capacities we have for dealing with bubbles. We are now forming a bubble in population, and in material and energy consumption.

Sustainable Growth for Hawaii -- Expert Panel Program

Use this link to load or print a PDF version of this announcement.

Real and Affordable Green or Misguideded Dream?

Bjørn Lomborg is the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and an adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School. I trust his analyses much more than the "data free" propaganda of the Sierra Club and the Blue Plant Foundation of Hawaii. Here is a summary in his words of his latest assessment titled Seeming Green.

• Danish politicians – like politicians elsewhere – claim that a green economy will cost nothing, or may even be a source of new growth. Unfortunately, this is not true. Globally, there is a clear correlation between higher growth rates and higher CO2 emissions. Furthermore, nearly every green energy source is still more expensive than fossil fuels, even when calculating pollution costs. We do not burn fossil fuels simply to annoy environmentalists. We burn them because fossil fuels have facilitated virtually all of the material advances that civilization has achieved over the last few hundred years.
• Politicians in Denmark and elsewhere argue as if this were no longer true: a transition to a green economy will create millions of new “green jobs.” But, while green-energy subsidies generate more jobs in green-energy sectors, they also displace similar numbers of jobs elsewhere.
• Many politicians are drawn to photo opportunities and lofty rhetoric about “building a green economy.” Unfortunately, the green-energy policies currently being pursued are not helping the environment or the economy. More likely, they will lead to greater emissions in China, more outsourcing to India, and lower growth rates for the well-intentioned “green” countries.

International Award on Sustainability Research

I am very pleased to have received this international award along with my research collaborators.

Out of 2,000 scientific papers submitted for the 2011 international conference of the World Road Association (also known as PIARC), 620 were selected to be presented at the conference and 8 received awards. One of the 8 was ours!

Lambros Mitropoulos is one of my doctorate students; he will be graduating at the end of 2011. Professor Teti Nathanail of Thessaly University spent summers 2009 and 2010 at UH-Manoa. Another paper with Dr. Nathanail was published the U.S. Transportation Research Board: "Risk Assessment for the Transportation of Hazardous Materials through Tunnels." (Transportation Research Record, No. 2162: 98-106, 2010.)


The full paper is titled: LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT THROUGH A COMPREHENSIVE SUSTAINABILITY FRAMEWORK: A CASE STUDY OF URBAN TRANSPORTATION VEHICLES

Honolulu Heavy Rail Is an Energy Black Hole

Energy and Honolulu rail is an angle that I did not have time to look at in detail, until last week when my students did some energy analysis of Honolulu’s proposed rail. They discovered this June 2008 article by Sean Hao: Rail's use of energy subject of debate in the Honolulu Advertiser.

Of note is that the rail will consume about 20 MW of energy which is about 20% of the capacity of HECO’s new palm oil plant. Unfortunately peak rail travel coincides with peak demand for electricity around 6 PM, which means that rail will stress HECO’s generators.

Now if you believe the city’s numbers which are based on incredible ridership projections and substantial bus route eliminations, Table 4-21 of the Final EIS shows that the rail project will save 2,440 million British thermal units (BTU) of energy each day, or about 610,000 million BTU per year.

Hao correctly added that: “Any evaluation of the energy savings generated by rail also needs to consider the massive amount of energy required during construction. For example, construction of the fixed guideway will require between 3.7 trillion and 4.9 trillion BTU of energy, according to Parsons Brinckerhoff.”

This quote reveals two startling facts:

First the unnamed Parsons Brinkerhoff source clearly lied to Hao by stating roughly half the correct amount of BTU. The 2008 Draft EIS, Table 4-34 on page 4-159, shows that the rail’s Airport alignment will require 7,480,000 MBTU. That’s 7.5 trillion BTU, not 3.7 trillion.

Second, by dividing 7,480,000 by 610,000 we get 12.2. That’s how many years it will take to make up the construction energy loss by the purported energy savings. But in reality these 12 years are an understatement because Hawaii's vehicle fleet is much smaller in engine size (more economical) than mainland fleet and the adoption of hybrid and electric vehicles is vastly bigger on Oahu. In addition the national averages are based on low vehicle occupancy, whereas Oahu has among the highest transit and carpooling rates, so BTU per passenger mile is way lower than mainland.

The City's BTU savings estimate may be wrong by a factor of 3 or larger, so it will take so many years for rail to "make up" its construction energy waste that before break-even is reached, rail will need multiple component replacements, repairs and refurbishments. So an energy black hole it is!

On the other hand, our 2008 simulation estimates using the DEIS traffic numbers show that rail is a net energy loser without even counting the huge energy consumption during construction. In comparison, a properly designed and operated HOT lane system will save energy (motor fuel and oil.)

Fuel Consumption for One Peak Hour (in US gallons) Change from Base of ~97,000 gallons
ALTERNATIVE	Motor Fuel	Motor Fuel plus Diesel at HECO for Rail
Rail: 6.5% traffic reduction	-2.6%	-0.3%
Rail: 3.25% traffic reduction	-0.4%	1.9%
HOT Lanes and Four Underpasses	-40.5%	-40.5%

Volt, Prius or CRV? Numbers Make the Choice Obvious.

The fully worded question is: How does the extended-range GM Volt Electric Vehicle compare with Toyota’s fourth generation hybrid Prius and Honda’s popular compact SUV the CRV?

I was not inclined to immediately dismiss the GM Volt as an expensive failure, (e.g., Chevy Volt is Automotive Version of Solyndra) and the October 2011 issue of Consumer Reports (CR) encouraged me to look into this different car.

Although CR did not award the Volt its coveted Recommended status, some of its critique is excellent for a compact car with unconventional technology:

• “Responsive steering makes the Volt feel fairly nimble in turns.”
• “The Volt was secure at its handling limits.”
• “The ride feels solid and firm yet compliant.”
• “Braking distance was very good overall.” And this one:
• “The Volt is amazingly inexpensive to run on short trips.”

The last one has twice the significance for Honolulu. Because of the compactness of the land, we make many more short trips in Honolulu than motorists in spread out mainland cities with about one million population. But our electricity cost is roughly three times higher than mainland US.

Does a Volt make a good choice? We can arrive at an answer by comparing it to two popular choices in Honolulu like the Toyota Prius and the Honda CRV. (1)

CR compared their $43,000 Volt to a $26,500 Toyota Prius and a $18,500 Hyundai Elantra. It excluded the purchase cost. Based on gasoline and kilowatt-hour costs, CR found that Volt is cheapest for 30 mile trips, is similar to hybrids for 70 mile trips, and loses its advantage as trips get longer.

To get to a better answer I used both Honolulu and US mainland prices for fuel and electricity, 30 mile and 70 mile trips, an 8 year/100,000 mile horizon (that’s when Volt's battery warranty expires), US and Hawaii tax incentives, and resale value at the end of 8 years. One component that remains uncertain in these half life-cycle cost estimations is maintenance.

In 8 years, Prius and CRV will make extensive use of their internal combustion engine. They would need about 20 oil changes and a few component replacements which should cost $1,000 to $2,000. Also both of them may require transmission repairs which are not applicable to the Volt. Both Volt and Prius have regenerative braking so they may not need brake pads before 100,000 miles but the CRV will likely need two sets of front brake pads and rotor resurfacing. Brake costs for the CRV for 8 years and 100,000 miles may come close to $1,000. Maintenance and repairs play a role in life cycle cost.

Insurance, finance charges, license, annual registration and safety inspections were not included because they are similar for all three cars for the same driver at a given location, e.g., registration and insurance rates vary widely by state. (As of this writing I am not certain that Volt is subject to Smog Test where applicable.) These costs do not affect the bottom line choice.

Discounted parking and other perks for EVs were not included. Currently EV perks in Hawaii are as follows:

• Special electric vehicle license plates.
• Free parking at State and County facilities including meters.
• Free parking at UH parking structure.
• Exemptions from high occupancy vehicle lanes.

For some users these perks may amount to more than $1,000 per year, at taxpayer expense (e.g., a stall occupied by an EV cannot be occupied by a fee-paying vehicle, so EV user gains amount X and taxpayer loses parking revenue X.)

A big unknown is the durability and replacement cost of Volt's battery. GM's warranty is for 8 years and 100,000 miles. Note that California requires 10 years/150,000 miles. As a result, Volt buyers will not receive California's $5,000 incentive. This limitation is not applicable to Hawaii.

The Prius' entire hybrid system (which includes the hybrid battery pack) is warranted for 8 years/100,000 miles. A battery replacement with a new one at a dealership costs roughly $4,000. There are lower cost options such as Re-Involt Technologies in North Carolina: “...batteries for the Prius 2001-2010 are $1675.00 plus shipping and your old battery.”

The table above details my estimates for the usage of these three cars in Honolulu using monthly gasoline prices and my own electricity bills to determine the actual bottom line cost of HECO’s price to the household. This price was then reduced by 6 cents, a discount that HECO offers if the EV is charged at home overnight. I assumed that this preferential treatment will last for the 8 year horizon in my analysis. HECO installation of a appropriate meter, purchase and installation of a 240V charger add over $2,500. There is a $750 incentive for the 240V charger.

Despite Honolulu’s expensive electricity, use of the Volt exclusively for short trips is much cheaper than its competitors. Honolulu Volt owner’s running cost comes to $595; the same cost at an average U.S. mainland city is $283.

Then I used a mix of 5 trips of 30 miles each and 2 trips of 70 miles each, per week, to arrive at my bottom line estimates. With such usage, the Volt, Prius and CRV will cost $1,150, $992 and $2,044, respectively, to run for 12,500 miles per year in Honolulu, and $698, $843 and $1,738, respectively, to run for 12,500 miles per year at an average mainland city.

Volt is the cheapest to operate on short and medium trips on the mainland, and Prius is the cheapest to operate on short and medium trips in Honolulu; about $150 cheaper than the Volt and more than $1,000 cheaper than the CRV. HECO’s high price per kilowatt-hour takes a toll on Volt.

Using Edmunds.com’s True Market Value(2), a flat documentation fee, 4.5% tax (GET in Hawaii, 8% sales tax on mainland) and applicable incentives, I arrived at the following cost estimates:

CRV has a purchase price of about $26,000 and Prius is about $29,500. Volt is $31,500 after $7,500 in federal incentives and $4,500 in Hawaii incentives have been deducted. These prices include destination charges and regional adjustments of about $750 (an add-on to car cost in Hawaii.) Due to lower state incentives and higher sales taxes, the Volt is about $3,000 more expensive on the US mainland. The other two are about the same as in Hawaii.

The bottom half of the table above is the bottom line. I arrived there by estimating today’s resale value of the three vehicles for 8 years in the future, using Edmunds.com. Both CRV and Prius have an over 10 year history on the market so their used car value is reliable. There are no estimates for the year-old Volt, so I assumed that it will have a resale value equal to the Prius.

Bottom line is that in Honolulu over 8 years and 100,000 miles the CRV will have a total cost of $33,775, the Prius will cost $27,888 and Volt comes in the middle with a total cost of $31,080. Mainland estimates are in the same order with only the CRV costing about $1,500 less than Hawaii due to the cheaper gasoline price.

With analysis like this, one can run “what if” scenarios quickly. What if average gasoline price for the next 8 years increases by a whopping 50% over the 18-month average I used? This would take Honolulu’s average gas price to $5.43 per gallon. In this case, the bottom line for the three cars will be as follows: the CRV will have a total cost of $41,963, the Prius will cost $31,861 and Volt would come in the middle at $32,589 (... plus registration, insurance, maintenance, parking and other applicable fees ... and the charger for the Volt.)

But over 75% of Oahu’s electricity comes from oil and this is not likely to change by much in the next 8 years. So if gasoline goes up by 50%, then electricity will go up by at least 30%. This increases Volt’s bottom line cost to $34,394. So even with very expensive gasoline Prius is cheaper than the Volt by $2,500.

All estimates indicate that Volt is a losing proposition to its buyer and it is certainly a losing proposition to the taxpayer because tax incentives of $12,000 are involved in the sale of every Volt in Hawaii. A Volt buyer could have gotten a much lower priced hybrid car and $12,000 of taxpayer monies could have gone to far more worthy causes. Parking incentives and the tax credit for the home charger may also add several thousand dollars of taxpayer subsidies.

Even the most extreme of “green” advocates cannot argue that the environmental benefits of each Volt over a Prius are worth $10,000 to $20,000 depending on location and taxpayer subsidized perks.

The Volt is a huge “miss” for GM, a manufacturer that could least afford a costly “miss,” and the total financial blunder from this vehicle is attributable to misguided policies (of the familiar liberal type.) Billions more will be spent on mandated EV chargers at parking lots, and on government fleet purchases of Volts.

Postcripts: (1) What about the all electric Nissan Leaf? Look for my updated coverage that will include the Leaf once reliable data become available, most likely early next year. (2) Edmunds.com is a reliable publication that I also used in my doctorate dissertation to determine car values in the late 1980s. It includes a “True Cost to Own” estimator that takes into account most of the life-cycle categories mentioned in my article. It has no estimates for Leaf and Volt.

Nuclear Power Plant ... Oxymorons and Solutions

The Economist has a useful tool for looking up which have nuclear power and how much electricity they produce in a year. The U.S. leads the pack.

One of the oddities of nuclear power is that some countries like Greece are strongly opposed to nuclear power, yet less than 100 miles away their Bulgarian neighbors already have nuclear power plants ... This reminds me of Hawaii with its nuclear power plant constitutional prohibition and the 15 nuclear submarines home ported in Pearl Harbor.

The difficult management of a failing power plant due to major force of nature as witnessed in Japan makes a strong case for locating them on off shore floating platforms (e.g., refurbished decommissioned air carriers.) These platforms, like off shore rigs can be manned as required by helicopter flights but they can be engineered for self power and management by remote control (like the unmanned drones of the air force.)

In the extremely rare care of nuclear reactor failure the floating platform can be de-anchored and de-tethered, and then robotically powered away from populations. This plan offers significant economic, safety and psychological benefits. Perhaps the state of Georgia should look into a floating platform 10-20 miles out in the Atlantic among its alternatives for locating a very large nuclear power plant.

Hawaii Clean Energy: Part 1 -- Goals and Reality

Hawaii's past history for electricity generation does not bode well for its "clean energy" goals.

Hawaii has a goal of reaching 40% renewable energy by 2040. Possible? Yes! Probable? Definitely not!

Here is why, based on our past history as documented in DBEDT statistics. I used 1993 as the reference year because in 1993 three large energy projects came online: Two on Oahu, the AES coal plant and the H-Power plant, and one on the Big Island, the Puna Geothermal Venture plant.

As a result of these large new power plant investments, oil consumption in 1993 dropped by 11.5% compared to 1992. Ten years later, in 2002 Hawaii was back at the 1992 level of oil consumption for electricity generation!

DBEDT statistics I could find had 2008 as the most recent year in the data series, so I used the 1993 to 2008 period and estimated that Hawaii energy needs increased by 12.75%. I assumed that this will be the growth of demand for electricity for 2025.

I also assumed that:
(1) Both oil and coal consumption will stay constant at the 2008 level.
(2) Covanta will successfully bring online a third "boiler" and increase power production by 50%, by expanding from 2 boilers to 3 boilers.
(3) Hydroelectric power will stay constant.

Based on these assumptions, all the additional energy will need to be produced from renewable energy sources. How much renewable energy does Hawaii need to add compared to its 2008 renewable power plant set?

• 300% increase in geothermal
• 300% increase in wind
• 300% increase in biomass, and
• 1,000% increase in solar

[Note: these are numerical examples of renewable energy shares that may satisfy Hawaii's electricity needs in 2025. These shares of renewable sources of electric power are not a recommended strategy for Hawaii.]

All these investments in renewable energy are only sufficient for keeping the oil and coal "dependency" constant at 2008 levels.

If these investments were to be executed in the next 14 years, Hawaii's renewable attainment will be 19.8% in 2025.


The pie-in-the-sky state goal calls for 33% renewable electricity generation by 2025. My 19.8% estimate is optimistic: If by 2025 Oahu has a working rail system and several thousand electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles, they will require much more electric power than the amount I used for my estimations of Hawaii's 2025 power needs. As a result, the renewable energy attainment will be lower than 19.8%.

It is critically important for Hawaii to (1) set realistic goals, and (2) ensure that the right types and technologies of clean and renewable energy are installed.

This article in the Hawaii Tribune-Herald contains some of my views on energy for Hawaii.