ISLAND VOICES
Making Hawai'i free from oil
By Ed Cesar
Kahalu'u resident
Your Jan. 4 editorial, "Freedom from oil: let's make it a national cause," is right on the mark. Whether or not the president designates freedom from oil as a national goal, Hawai'i should make it a state objective and set a realistic date for it to be achieved. Here are some specific actions we might take.
Our representatives in Washington, D.C., should ask Congress to designate Hawai'i as a pioneer location for developing hydrogen-based fuels (assuming that hydrogen is the most feasible and desirable new form of energy) and provide funds for research and development. As a first step, a demonstration plant might be built on a surplus ocean vessel at our shipyards to furnish power to the HECO grid by, say, 2013.
While considering this and other ideas, let's not abandon the one about burying O'ahu's power and telephone lines. The recent experiences with strong winds on Guam, the Solomon Islands and here on O'ahu recently are testament to the wisdom that no island country should have cables above ground. Besides their unsightliness and frequent cause of annoying outages, exposed lines can be detrimental to our nation's security and economic well-being.
Hawai'i is, after all, a strategic hub for telephone and data between the U.S. Mainland, the Pacific and beyond. We must elevate the importance of cable burial above the eyesore and tourism level to the national and state strategic realm.
I recommend our state government designate buried cables as a goal and call for a plan of action with dates for when and where underground cables will be installed. It should no longer be a question of whether or not burial is cost-effective. The costs to all of us if we are struck by a hurricane will be too great not to do it.
Besides, if we are hit by an 'Iniki-sized storm, our governor would have to ask the federal government for help. Why not be proactive and address this peril sooner rather than react to it later, perhaps several times over? Since our state is unable to bear the full cost alone, we need to obtain federal tax dollars to pay 80 percent, and derive 20 percent from state bonds — just as funds for new roads are obtained. After all, a cable is just another kind of road.
What does burying power and communications (telephone, computer, cell phone, Fax, TV, data) cables have to do with oil dependence, you ask? If we are able to generate electricity using hydrogen-based fuel, the power plants are expected to be much smaller than the ones we have now. They might be distributed widely around our Islands and controlled from a central location. Perhaps shopping malls, housing developments and groups of office buildings will each have their own, with all of them tied together for control and mutual reinforcement.
The argument of cable burial being of strategic national importance should be made by our state representatives in Washington when they request funds to help bury all the existing long lines used for power distribution and communications, not just those at or near satellite terminals and undersea cable vaults.
Telephone and data communications between Europe, Latin America, the U.S. Mainland from the west and Australia, Korea, China, Japan and elsewhere in the Far East are enabled by satellite links and undersea cables that are connected together on O'ahu. Consequently, all the states and many foreign countries benefit from secure and uninterrupted service here. This greatly depends upon power and communications cables being kept continuously intact.
Everything begins with a plan. Hawai'i needs a minimum of two major ones with established and realistic goals: oil independence and provisions for uninterrupted power and communications. They go hand in hand. So there is much work ahead for our Legislature.
And speaking of work, all the above means lots of good jobs for many people in Hawai'i. Wouldn't it be great if Hawai'i became the place where the world's dependence on oil for fuel finally began to end?
