If you actually head over to the BLUETTI website, there’s an enormous range of portable power products you can buy, for all sorts of needs and all sorts of people. One thing that hit me recently is how much these really do cut the use of polluting fossil fuels. In … [continued]
The newly published white paper began with a question that persisted because of how clearly island systems expose the realities of energy. Can Hawaiʻi, an isolated archipelago with no continental grid behind it and a long dependence on imported fuels, build an energy system that is cleaner, more resilient, more … [continued]
Originally published on Ililani Media, Life of the Land, by Henry Curtis Bill McKibben has spent forty years warning the world about the climate crisis. He co-founded 350.org and Third Act — an organization mobilizing Americans over sixty for progressive change — and has written bestsellers including The End of … [continued]
Hawaiʻi’s LNG turn was sold as a practical answer to a practical problem. The state has high electricity prices, aging oil-fired generation, isolated island grids, and political pressure to cut bills without creating reliability problems. HSEO’s January 2025 alternative fuels study was built around that frame. It was focused on … [continued]
Iran and the Strait of Hormuz are not abstractions for Hawaiʻi. They are a reminder that the state still buys its energy from global fuel markets it does not control. The International Energy Agency described 2022 as the first truly global energy crisis, and recent reporting on the Gulf shock … [continued]
Naturally, just when Hawaiʻi’s decarbonization pathway starts to look complete, another chapter occurs to me. After the generation mix, the island-by-island resource story, the transport implications, and the logic of electrification, what remains is the part of the energy transition that fossil systems used to provide almost by accident. Hawaiʻi … [continued]
Oʻahu was the test case, but it was never the whole question. The real question for Hawaiʻi was always whether the same logic that makes decarbonization viable on the most populous island would also hold across the rest of the inhabited archipelago. If Oʻahu could get to a clean, resilient, … [continued]
This is the culminating article in a series exploring from the outside a decarbonization solution set and coarse roadmap for Hawaiʻi. It is a set of possible next actions that a Hawaiian agency, utility, authority, or coalition could undertake if the roadmap outlined in this series is worth exploring further. … [continued]
What follows is a draft roadmap for a decarbonized O’ahu. This roadmap does not appear out of nowhere. It follows a long chain of analysis that rebuilt Oʻahu’s energy system piece by piece. Earlier articles stripped away overseas aviation fuel, international maritime bunkering, and military demand to isolate the island’s … [continued]
Hawaiʻi’s debate over importing liquefied natural gas has turned on a state study that was supposed to show whether LNG could lower electricity costs on Oʻahu while serving as a bridge to a cleaner system later. The scenario sold for the past year turned out to be based on a … [continued]
