The Big Island
For the past five years, home for me has been on the northern end of the island of Hawaiʻi. For those unfamiliar with the Hawaiian islands, they consist of eight major islands. The biggest of these islands is the island of Hawaiʻi, also known as the “Big Island.” The Big Island has a land area of 4,028 square miles — bigger than the area of Rhode Island and Delaware combined, and almost as large as Connecticut. It is also home to a couple of volcanoes that are over 13,500 high (and incidentally do see snow during the cooler months). But the population density of the Big Island is much lower that the other small states at 185,000 people, versus around a million in both Rhode Island and Delaware, and 3.5 million in Connecticut.
Hawaii has abundant energy resources from wind, the sun, geothermal, water, and biomass. Yet Hawaii relies on petroleum for 80 percent of its energy, making it by far the most petroleum-dependent state. One major reason for this is that Hawaii is the only state that still gets a large portion of its electricity from oil. Over the years the states on the mainland displaced oil with coal, natural gas, and nuclear power, and today are starting to displace some of these with renewables. But Hawaii doesn’t have coal trains or natural gas pipelines, so we continued to use oil for electricity even as everyone else switched. The cost of continued oil reliance to electricity consumers has been very high. . . .
http://www.energytrendsinsider.com/2014/04/23/renewable-hydrogen-on-the-big-island/
