HECO's Renewable Watch

Hawaiian Electric Company (HECO) has launched a website which displays in near real time the generation of electric power on each Hawaiian island by solar (photovoltaic or PV) and wind renewable energy: Renewable Watch.

Shown below is the image for the Island of Oahu caught at the time of this post...

At this instance at 11:54 AM, solar PV is making 142 MW whereas wind is making 58 MW.

Household Electricity and Solar Panels

This brief analysis is a simple case of a picture is worth one thousand words.

The GREEN line is our house's monthly electricity consumption which averages about 450 kilo-watt-hours or KWh.

The ORANGE line is our house's monthly solar panel electricity production which averages about 250 KWh.

To make them directly comparable both averages were normalized to the level of 100. Also these were further smoothed to account for HECO's accounting variability because some monthly bills include as few as 28 days or as many as 33 days. So power consumption was estimated on a per day basis and then converted to a monthly basis.

What is there to observe?  Simply that the solar (renewable electricity) production profile is not at all in tune with our household's monthly electricity consumption. Humid days call for more A/C use, Christmas celebrations call for more lights and cooking, summer months take us to vacations or time away from home, but the sun's trajectory and cloud density do not follow any of these habits.

The lesson on a grand scale is that a city, state or country cannot possibly depend on renewables such as wind and sun for more than a small fraction such as 10% for its power generation because of significantly negative productivity, health and safety implications.

One must be a great fool to believe that the large deviations shown in the graph (which can be extreme on an hour-by-hour basis) can be covered by ... batteries.

On the other hand, renewables from geothermal, nuclear and tidal wave harnessing are in a different class and can offer base-load reliability that covers the fluctuating needs of a large population concentration. But even them they need supplementation by true base load power generation from nuclear, coal, oil or natural gas power plants. As mentioned in an earlier article, waste-to-energy for Maui, natural gas for Oahu and geothermal power plant development on the Big Island are best near term choices for Hawaii.

The Public and Private Versions of Solar Power, in Brief

Private version: The installation of photovoltaic panels to generate electric power utilizes unused rooftops and provides free building cooling. (Y. Hata Co., Honolulu, HI.)







Public version: The installation of photovoltaic panels to generate electric power wastes productive land, wastes taxpayer funds, and lies about sustainable green jobs; there aren't any. (DHHL, Kalaeloa, HI)

Senator Schatz is Wrong about Wind Energy -- Part 2: Sample Responses

Most people dislike irresponsible calls for "improvement at any cost" although some accept cost-ineffective renewables. The quotes below are a sample of the responses I received to my AIKEA FOR HONOLULU No. 31.


Alexa: Thank you for the informative email. But I still do not know what we the poor residents can do to help ourselves and Hawaii from the increasing expense.

Patty: They surely are an eye sore.  Did not appreciate seeing them as I toured visiting friends around the island.

Teri H.: “No” to liquefied gas. At some point, someone has to have the courage to advocate and implement renewable energy.

Robert: 3 cents per kw, does that include the cost of Columbia river dams and lost salmon runs?
No such thing as a free lunch but you are right about distributed pv.

Greg W.: Tell them to come to South Point on the Big Island. Are they trying to finish off the Nene and the Io?

John D.: wind energy, in my opinion is better than solar, or at least compliments it. just note all of us who have blue water sailboats- sun by day, and wind by nite- at nite, the sun is gone, but the wind blows, continuing to give energy. i like that. i don't like the idea of huge turbines in my immediate neighborhood, but small individual ones like i mentioned, are fantastic... keeps the beer cold.

Thomas S.: What is wrong with a Babcock and Wilcox 300 MW nuclear plant?  The most ecologically sensitive plant and with power storage that will keep Hawaii lit a for a long time.
        Liquefied Natural Gas is replacing the Kewaunee, Wis. Nuclear Plant that my father helped build in 1960......my mom, still gets 10 cent per KWH retail power out of that plant as of this moment.  (I checked her electric bill).

Bruce: I also agree with you that rooftop solar can make it on its own, without any state or federal tax credits, which are expected to expire in a couple of years.  We were fortunate to take advantage of the credits and our $50K system cost us just $17.5K.  It should pay for itself in 4 years.  Without tax credits, it would still pay for itself in 12 years and, because we purchased well-designed panels, I expect the lifetime to exceed 30 years.  We installed PV panels on our cabin in Colorado 20+ years ago, and they are still working fine...even being exposed to snow.

Patrick P: how about wind turbines, pv, and rain turbines on all erected light fixtures across the state?

Kaniu, Big Island: Mahalo nui Panos for the truth

Linda P.: Panos, we appreciate you!  Thank you for fighting the good fight and for keeping us informed.  Wish the good senator (and many others) had your intelligence, logic and values!

Valere: Thank you for always telling it like it is and for doing such credible research. I do disagree, however, about the PV systems because most of the panels are constructed in China and the mining of materials used in the panels is extremely toxic. Firefighters in California can refuse to fight a fire on building that has solar panels. And these projects survive on subsidies. It is fallacious to say that the tax benefits received by individuals and corporations are not subsidies. It's just a different name for the same thing.

S.V, Pukalani: I speak from looking hard at rooftop solar installations on Maui.  It is a wonderful and economic problem.  The only sticking point here is that Maui Electric has limited the number of penetration circuits allowed for home solar.  Reason - it impinges on their base load generation.

Tim D.: How about something simpler:  Cut demand by tax credits (and building code) for simple, non capital-intensive technologies like insulation, attic fans, and best-practices lighting (Say Energy Star Gold rating).  Mandate homes (single family & up to 4-plexes) convert to solar power hot water over the next decade.

Gordon K., Retired HECO: In November 2012 I attended the Hawaii Health Dept. hearing on Greenhouse Gas regulations.  Everybody was there--Health Dept., engineers, regulators, utilities and refineries, and environmentalists.
     I asked a question.  We live in a highrise apartment, and electricity costs us $200 per month.  I asked how much our electric bill would be after all of the solar and wind farms, rooftop solar, and undersea cables are built.  There was total silence.  A few people pointed up at the ceiling.  Afterward an engineer told me, "That was a novel question you asked.  No one ever asked that question before."
     In other words we all accepted the renewable energy without question or regard for cost.  Now that we're retired and living on pensions, cost matters a lot.  I intend to ask that question a lot more in the future.

AIKEA FOR HONOLULU No. 31 – Senator Schatz is Wrong about Wind Energy

A TV ad started last week shows U.S. Senator Brian Schatz promoting “energy that’s moving Hawaii forward. Senator Brian Schatz is leading the effort to harness our incredible wind energy potential with tax credits to grow wind energy production that would create thousands of new jobs and clean energy.”

Hawaii residents from Waianae to Kahuku, from Molokai to Lanai, and everywhere in the between dislike wind turbines. Senator Schatz promotes more taxpayer monies for special interests who are peddling a technology that cannot make it on its own. He is wrong for the following reasons.

Independently from any politics, a Punahou and UH-Manoa graduate student and I conducted detailed research on cost effective energy solutions for Hawaii, by examining all major energy sources available to Hawaii.  A summary of our work was accepted by Pacific Business News last month, and was published this week: Making the Case for Liquefied Natural Gas.

Our research concluded that wind and solar power plants are ineffective; they require multimillion dollar subsidies. The solar energy in our research was the power plant type that consumes land in order to produce some daytime electricity, similar to the 36 acres wasted by the Pohoiki plant at Kalaeloa to produce only 5 MW!

On the other hand, solar photovoltaic panels have been locally accepted by thousands of homeowners and businesses. Rooftop PV is an incremental, distributed power source with near zero visual or other negative impacts for Hawaii, as I explained here: Big Rooftop Solar Panels Make Sense in Hawaii - without Any Subsidies! Rooftop PV supports dozens of local small businesses.

Recently BMW decided to locate its electric vehicle chassis assembly in a region of Washington State because the local electricity rate is 3 cents (!) per kilowatt-hour.  HECO’s rate on Oahu is over 33 cents and thanks to Senator Schatz’s flawed advocacy, our electricity costs will increase, and Hawaii will become increasingly uncompetitive.

I urge Senator Schatz to review the three page summary of our research titled The Next 100 MW Power Plant for Oahu and modify his views about renewable energy. America’s future cannot be supported by intermittent, unreliable and expensive energy.

Hawaii does not need unsightly turbines and cannot afford their cost and flaky reliability. And please stop bragging about the jobs. Hawaii has fewer than 50 turbines and fewer than 50 people are located here to manage them … that is, when the turbines are not down due to fires or other self-inflicted damage.

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.

Electric Vehicles Are Here to Stay. In Moderate Numbers.

The MIT Review titles the infographic below: Electric Vehicles are Here to Stay.

Yes, but the case for them is not particularly strong and their market penetration will be small for a very long time, for two big reasons.  One is EV's marginal environmental benefit. The infographic clearly shows that the big improvement comes when a gasoline-powered vehicle is converted to hybrid: Its emissions drop from 0.87 pounds of CO2 per mile to 0.57 pounds per mile. All the fuss to get to EV cuts CO2 down only to 0.54 pounds per mile (and probably leaves a much bigger problem with battery recycling at the end.) In addition this estimate does not likely account for all the charging infrastructure that is being installed from scratch.

The second reason is the affordable price of fuel, gasoline in particular. It will be priced at around $4 per gallon for a long time thanks to major forces that work against major price increases, such as:

1. Hydraulic fracturing of fracking for natural gas extraction, which curbs the demand for oil by vast amounts. (In 2000 fracking yielded 1% of the natural gas production in the US. In 2010 it yielded 20% of the production. A breakneck acceleration in such a capital intensive industry thanks to my fellow Greek and father of fracking George Phydias Mitchell.)
2. Sustained oil prices in the $50 to $100 per barrel make expensive explorations affordable, so a healthy supply of oil will be available to satiate the increasing demands of the developing world.
3. Substantially decreased demand for gasoline due to the popularity of high mpg vehicles (CAFE requirements and sales success of hybrids and plug-in hybrids; can't buy a Hummer anymore.)
4. Less travel due to persistent high unemployment and mega economic downers such as debt, deficit, bankrupt cities and countries, and looming pension and health care social costs in the US.
5. Continued public and private investment in renewable sources of energy.

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.

Have We "Solved" the US Energy Crisis? Update: No!

In the last couple of weeks I stumbled through some blog articles (e.g., These Charts Better Not Reflect The True State Of The US Economy) that describe an astonishing development: Gasoline consumption has collapsed! (... Not really: See update at the bottom.)

• Feb. 1993: 57 million gallons per day
• Feb. 2003: 61 million gallons per day (+7%)
• Feb. 2013: 28 million gallons per day (-54%)

See the data for yourself at the U.S. Energy Information Administration. I captured the graph below.

If this is not a hacker's job, we are witnessing momentous changes in the energy field. No wonder that Tesoro-Hawaii cannot find a buyer for its refinery at Campbell Industrial Park for over a year.

Also, the implications for the Highway Trust Fund and State DOTs are enormous. Their funding has been cut in half.

If this pattern is sustained, then all climate initiatives need to be shelved... "2040 targets" are already met!

The following reasons may explain this trend in part. I guestimate that the factors I list below can cause an one third reduction but I am not convinced that they can cause a staggering 54% reduction:

• Gas price: A 10% increase in fuel price may cause a 2% to 5% reduction in trips and/or trip length. High gas prices reduce discretionary trips but do not reduce trips with an important purpose such as work, school, trips to doctor and grocery store, etc.
• Persistently high gas price may lead people to change location; they move closer to work or school and they may replace a low efficiency car with a high efficiency car.
• Unemployment in the US is much higher than officially reported since people who have given up looking for work are no longer counted as unemployed.
• There is some evidence that ties with unemployment that younger Americans drive less.
• Hybrid cars, electric cars and cash-for-clankers cars replaced thousands of low MPG cars so roughly speaking the same thousands of vehicles now consume less than half that their predecessors did.
• HOT lanes (that promote carpooling and provide uncongested travel) and transit may have caused a marginal reduction. 

==============================================

UPDATE: Colleagues on the mainland and I are still investigating this because the data shown above are suspect. This EIA dataset of gas consumption is much flatter. Using these data, the annual consumption differences are as follows:

• 2002 to 2012 = -1.6%
• 2005 to 2012 = -8.2%

2005 was the year with the highest consumption, according to this set.

Better MPG across most light duty vehicles classes, Hybrids, EVs, Cash-for-clankers and a little less driving did cause a drop. An 8% drop is much more believable than a 54% drop. We still do not know if these are "data we can believe in."  

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.

Want a Fine Electric Car? Not in Hawaii.

The Tesla S is a fine EV, comparable to a BMW 5 series or a Mercedes S class.  Tesla argues that their model S can also be cheaper than its competitors. It has developed a calculator to prove it, based on location, incentives, fuel and electricity prices, and owner annual mileage.

I looked into the Tesla S and made some calculations. A couple of months ago I mentioned on the Rick Hamada Program on KHVH that my estimates indicated that in Hawaii if I was choosing between a $50,000 Tesla S and a $50,000 BMW 528i,  I should buy the BMW. (Cars were optioned so that with EV incentives they came with approximately the same "out the door" cost.)

This is the outcome of outrageous electricity prices which, thanks to renewable energy mandates and meddling politicians who pick winners (for their own self-interests,) are continuously escalating,

As you can see below, the true cost to own a base Tesla S in Hawaii is 17% more than California and 34% more than Colorado (excluding applicable taxes, insurance and registration differences, etc.)

Local and International Threats to Hawaii's Sustainability

Earthquakes, Energy Supply, Tsunamis, Taxes and ... Politicians. A dozen long term threats to Hawaii's sustainability are explained in this installment of my O'lelo show PANOS 2050: Solutions for a Sustainable Hawaii.

Wind Power (DOWN), Natural Gas (WAY UP)

Forecast Dims for Future Growth in Wind Power

• "Even though total wind power capacity grew by 30 percent last year, with 13,000 megawatts in new wind turbines, the actual portion of our electricity coming from wind energy did not increase proportionally. "
• This is a huge understatement because next paragraph says: "But overall, wind power contributed only about 3.5% of all the electricity generated in the U.S. last year, up from 2.9% of the share in 2011."
• +30% in wind installations resulted in US wind power change from 2.9% to 3.5% a 0.6% gain.  NUTS!

Japan Just Opened Up a Whole New Source for Fossil Fuels

• The stores of offshore methane clathrates around Japan, says the BBC, are estimated at around 1.1 trillion cubic meters of the mix, enough to supply “more than a decade of Japan’s gas consumption.”
• The United States Geological Survey, says The Washington Post, estimates that gas hydrates worldwide “could contain between 10,000 trillion cubic feet to more than 100,000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.”
• Some of that gas will never be accessible at reasonable prices. But if even a fraction of that total can be commercially extracted, that’s an enormous amount. To put this in context, U.S. shale reserves are estimated to contain 827 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

In case I am not mistaken, Hawaii is surrounded by ocean ...

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!

Energy from Trash Should Be a Priority for Hawaii

Read the full article in Honolulu Civil Beat. Selected highlights:

The long term economy of Waste to Energy (WtE) plants is very good. There is plenty fuel (trash, waste and biomass). Municipalities pay the WtE plant to take their trash. The utility pays the WtE plant for the mega-watts of electricity it produces. Trash volume reduces 6 to 10 times so landfill demand is minimized.

• Sweden imports waste from other Europe to fuel its WtE program. Maui should install a WtE plant and bring in trash from Big Island, Lanai and Molokai. Oahu should plan for another 100 MW of WtE (about half of it tuned to burn biomass, sludge and manure) and bring in trash from Kauai. Barges return to Honolulu from Kauai practically empty.
• Both Oahu and Maui should consider ordering a sophisticated MRF, or Materials Recovery Facility, to better sort materials such as glass (by color), stones and similar inert materials, and all types of metals out of the trash. This would result in a cleaner burn at the WtE plant and revenue from recyclables, e.g., mixed glass is nearly worthless but glass sorted by color has value. So do sorted metals.
• To make Oahu more sustainable we should revise what we currently trash and what we recycle at home in the BLACK, GREEN and BLUE bins, as detailed in the post below.

Last but not least, The Economist notes that "Energy from waste plants that use trash as a fuel to generate electricity and heat continue to have an image problem. That is unfair, because the technology has advanced considerably and has cleaned up its act." As depicted in the image blow, very large part of modern WtE plants is devoted to pollution control.

Oahu Household Recycling

• Honolulu has the most expensive electricity rates among U.S. metro areas, by far.
• Oahu makes about 8% of its electricity from trash. It should plan to make 20% by 2020.
• Oahu generates thousands of tons of paper, plastic, and cardboard trash. This is free fuel for the production of electricity. Instead of making power with it, we waste energy to bale it and ship it out. That’s nuts!
• The next four slides explain what to recycle and what to throw in the trash.

 

Transportation and Energy Infrastructure Projects: Forecasting is Unnecessary

I enjoyed Dr. Martin Wachs' brief article Planning for High Speed Rail (HSR) in California. It centers around planning and forecasting: "The current debate is divisive precisely because improved data and models cannot provide a better glimpse into the future" Wachs says.

After nearly three decades in planning and policy, and six years involvement in local politics I have come to believe that forecasting is unnecessary as a primary decision making tool. Why?

Because transportation infrastructure deployment lags demand by decades. Why do we need to forecast 20+ years into the future? The need is present (or not.) Current data are the best quality data we have. So instead of making numerous uncertain assumptions about a future we do not control, let's assume that the project is built overnight and assess its benefits at the present time.

In the case of Hawaii, when I first relocated here in 1990, traffic congestion was the No. 1 issue and has remained in the top 10 ever since. Twenty three years later, roadway capacity addition has been marginal and most major bottlenecks have not been addressed. So why does the city's planned rail project have a 2030 horizon?

I think the answer is this: The proposed rail does not generate enough ridership with the current population so artificial demand balloons for population and jobs in 2030 are "forecast" to justify the system.

Similarly California has a population of 38 million with huge concentrations in Los Angeles and San Francisco metro areas. If HSR does not work for 38 million, then it won't work. Why is a 20 to 50 year projection needed?

Worse yet, the typical  planning models lack credibility because they are never tested with back-casting.  If Parsons Brinkerhoff's model is trusted to predict transit ridership (bus and rail) in Honolulu with year 2006 as baseline and 2030 as the horizon, does it also predict transit ridership for 1982?  In other words, we should check the model's ability to project forward by using the 24-year period from 1982 to 2006; for which we have perfect information. How does the model do?

I think the answer is this: It does very poorly and for this reason back-casting is never applied.(1)

Obviously, since the inception of a project, several years go by for environmental studies, design,  engineering, funding, bidding and construction. So a 10 years-out plan and forecast is needed. But multi-billion dollar energy and transportation infrastructure projects should be justified by their "now" value and not by future demand balloons.

If the projects are beneficial "now" then long range forecasts can be performed for selecting the proper size for them. For example a reversible highway sized at two lanes for sufficient congestion relief may need to be built with three lanes to accommodate future demand. Similarly a 1,000 MW power plant may be engineered with a 1,200 MW capacity for the future.

Projects funded with private capital, fully or partly as in Public-Private Partnerships, sophisticated risk analyses that protect investment from foreseeable risks are conducted. These meticulous and carefully inspected forecasts of project costs and revenues have little in common with the manipulated forecasts for taxpayer funded and subsidized systems, primarily transit systems.

For taxpayer funded projects forecasting is unnecessary and indeed misleading for decision making. It is commonly used a tool for deception, particularly for rail projects.(2)


Endnotes

(1) My students and I investigated the accuracy of traffic volume forecasts primarily in the agriculture-to-residential mega developments in Ewa between 1976 and 2002. We found this:

The study compared forecast traffic levels from Traffic Impact Analysis Reports prepared between 1976 and 2002 to actual traffic volumes recorded by the Hawaii State DOT in the city and county of Honolulu. The information extracted uniformly from 11 reports included year of report, consultant, type of project, location, movement, forecast horizon, forecast traffic volumes and forecasting method.

This study focused on road and residential developments and examined the accuracy of traffic demand forecasting, the conservative or optimistic tendency in traffic forecasts and the potential factors affecting accuracy. The results revealed that traffic forecasts are on average overestimated by 35% and there is a clear tendency to overestimate future traffic volume. Errors ranged from -40% to +200%.

SOURCE: Caroee, Maja, Panos D. Prevedouros and Alyx Yu, Volume Forecasts for Environmental Impact Statements and Traffic Impact Analysis Reports: Accuracy of Road and Residential Developments in Honolulu, Paper 13-1398, 92^nd Annual Meeting of Transportation Research Board, Washington, D.C., 2013.

(2) Flybjerg, Bent, et al., Delusion and Deception in Large Infrastructure Projects (2009)