Energy in Hawaii

Hawaii presents a set of of unique challenges and on the other hand fertile opportunities in the areas of green energy production and energy conservation. Because Hawaii is isolated, it is not part of a supergrid like the contiguous US states are, and therefore has to import its energy from further away, and is more susceptible to temporary supply/demand imbalances. On the other hand, because of its unique location, year-round sunny climate, and large number of shoreline miles, Hawaii is an ideal candidate for the early success of wind, sea, and sun, energy solutions.

Some of these solutions aren't yet cost-effective on the mainland due to the easy exploitation of cheap fossil fuels or the technological and infrastructure gap between fossil fuel production and green energy production. However, they are actually already cost-effective in Hawaii, despite the same technological gap, because Hawaii pays a surcharge on its electrical energy costs, due to transportation and isolation, that makes electrical energy 2-3 times more expensive than on the mainland. Unlike the mainland, Hawaii derives most of its electrical energy from oil, which is the most expensive fossil fuel.

Because of this unique economic situation, green energy is being pursued in Hawaii in a more aggressive way than in most mainland states, even by Republican administrations such as that of former governor Linda Lingle, who signed the Hawaii Clean Energy initiative, thus going against the grain of a Republican party that is largely skeptical of global warming, even to the point that many Republicans view global warming as a liberal scheme to stifle capitalism.

However, green energy production and use, does pose a few challenges. One of them is that green energy is typically intermittent. For example, a solar panel doesn't produce energy at night, and a windmill doesn't produce energy when there is no wind. So, to make the best use of these intermittent and time-varying energy sources, we need to integrate them within our current energy grid in a cohesive and efficient manner.

This means that two-way communication *and* control, need to take place between the energy consumer's home and the the electric power plant, and between the devices in the consumer's home. This would allow, for example, an electrical plant facing a demand spike to temporarily shut down the air conditioning system of some of their clients homes alternately for a few minutes to allow the smoothing out of the spike. It would also allow a home's air conditioning system to use more energy when that home's solar panels are producing more energy, thus changing the temperature activation set-point of the air-conditioner, to align itself with the temporarily greater energy being produced by the solar panels.

Of course, all this information communication and control, requires a a decent amount of hardware and even more software, as we strive to make the devices smarter and as we get new ideas for how to program and reprogram them. So, intelligent and robust software has a definite role to play in a green energy infrastructure. Beyond that, it may have an even bigger role to play in green energy research and calibration, as we need a way to visualize information in a decentralized manner, so that information from many places can be aggregated and viewed on one terminal. Even when deploying proven green energy solutions, an individual household will still want to adjust the parameters of the programs driving their energy saving devices, to optimize their individual household energy savings and target them at their specific needs, and this too requires software for input, validation, and communication.

So, it's nice to know that software is going to play an intricate role in the evolution of one of Hawaii's most exciting technology and research areas, and that getting the software right will save us all time, energy, and money.