HECO continues to invest in the past

Hawaiian Electric Co. continues to press forward with its plan to build a 13-mile oil pipeline from its tank farm at Campbell Industrial Park to its Waiau Power Plant in Pearl City.

Like many of its projects, Hawaiian Electric presents the pipeline as an imperative, not an option. These days, we're learning to take a closer look.

That certainly was the case with the power company's burning desire to march 100-foot power poles over Wa'ahila Ridge. So with HECO's hope to build a 13-mile pipeline, we continue to have these questions:

• What would be the environmental disruption and damage from the construction process? What is the added danger of oil spills with an additional pipeline? In 1996, more than 38,000 gallons of crude oil spilled into Pearl Harbor from a ruptured Chevron pipeline.

• Since building a new pipeline would render the Chevron pipeline presently used to supply the Waiau plant redundant, why exactly is a new pipeline needed? Will Chevron feel a need to hike gasoline prices to recover the lost lease income from its abandoned pipeline?

• HECO said a couple of years ago that the new pipeline will save $30 million over the next 30 years. If HECO is still nearly 100 percent dependent on power generated from fossil fuel 30 years from now, we're all in real trouble.

More and more we get the impression that HECO is a company wedded to the practice of investing in 19th-century technologies that will become expensive albatrosses around rate-payers' necks long before those investments are amortized.