I like to go every year to Maui and enjoy kite-surfing. More than the relaxed environment and the beautiful beaches, it is an opportunity to reconnect with nature and its powerful natural resources. As I was driving to North Shore every day, I noticed a wind solar farm located in the West Mai mountains... I inquired about it and learned that the Kaheawa wind farm generates 30MW thanks to 20 GE turbines scaterred along the ridgeline.
The name "Kaheawa" itself describes the wind pattern typically found in this location: wetter wind coming from the windward side of Maui that often brings cloud formations that seem to hover over the ridgeline. The people of the Hawaiian Islands have always had an intimate relationship with nature, so much so that natural occurrences are considered events, each with their own unique name.
As an abundant resource, the wind has historically played an important role in the culture of the Hawaiian Islands, and as result there are numerous terms here for each distinctive type of wind. "Olau koa" refers to a very strong wind. A wind strong enough to blow the leaves off the native Koa tree, one of the tallest trees in Hawaii that has long been treasured for its wood. "Kili hau" is the rain or mist at Kaheawa. It's the gentle, small, cold droplets that form near the end of a shower.
As we are rediscovering how dependent we are to nature, we do celebrate it with technology innovations. The State of Hawaii for example has launched a new initiative to produce 70% of its energy needs by 2030 from clean resources. In addition to power farms, solar panels are spreading on the island, from residential houses to business campuses alike. Surprisingly the State of Hawaii was only the 35th to implement a Net Energy Metering law to make solar power installations financially attractive.
Islands remain the perfect fit to develop a clean energy program and a sustainable closed community to test new ideas. Other countries like France provide higher feed-in tariffs than in metropolitan areas to promote the deployment of renewable energies. Pacific territories benefit of course from sunny weather year long and can tap easily into solar power; yet this does not explain this will.
Unlike urban cities, islands are physically disconnected to the rest of the world but need to compete to provide jobs and remain attractive. They cannot just rely on tourism and farming in the long run. The Maui High Performance Computing Center recently announced it doubled its computing capacity with the installation of new computing cluster. It is named after the supernatural force "mana". The DOD funded research computing center is now back in the top-50 list of supercomputers worldwide. Hopefully, the increase in power consumption is not off-setting the benefit of the wind power farm!
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