Oahu, meanwhile, straggles behind - HECO reports 15.1 percent of sales from renewable sources, a big chunk of which comes from H-POWER’s 46 MW waste-to-energy conversion.On Maui, the state’s largest wind farm at Kaheawa (a First Wind farm) delivers 30 MW to the island’s grid, and MECO’s renewable energy portfolio stands at 23.7 percent.In total, that’s about one-fifth of what Big Wind is scheduled to provide. The Big Island currently leads the renewable energy charge in Hawaii, with 39.5 percent of HELCO’s sales there coming from renewable sources: 33 MW of wind power, 30 MW of geothermal and 16 MW of hydroelectric.To give a sense of the scale of the challenge for Hawaiian Electric (and its vertically integrated subsidiaries HELCO, MECO, and HECO that operate the independent island grids) of incorporating Big Wind’s 400 megawatts of power into its electric service, consider:
Today, we analyze each of the four components of the project, summarize what needs to be resolved and explain how that might happen, if it’s to go forward. In Part 1 of this series, we gave an overview of the project and explained why it’s being studied. Big Wind, the largest renewable energy project proposed for Hawaii, has raised a torrent of questions.
