Aug
31
How the wind blows on Lanai
Filed Under Sunrise on KGMB9
Plans for a massive wind farm on Lanai are running into some community headwinds, but up to a point this is probably a good thing.
David Murdock, owner of Dole Food and Castle & Cooke, is also the owner of 98% of Lanai. He has so much power on the island, it is amazing anyone can stand him. Yet he is reasonably well-liked.
That doesn’t mean, however, that everyone is entirely happy with the idea of a $750 million wind farm with more than 100 great, big turbines spinning around where today there is almost inaccessible desert.
A few dozen people signed a letter expressing concerns about the plan, and on Lanai a few dozen people is a lot of people, when you figure that the vast majority of people work for Murdoch and aren’t going to be signing anything like that in case he wakes up one morning and decides not to employ people who diss him in the newspaper.
Community concern is good because it will lead to a better plan.
It would not be good if it blocked the plan. It would not be good if the desire to show the king his power is not absolute led to killing this plan instead of blocking something that’s actually bad, like the foolish ongoing practice of using the island’s aquifer to water the golf course greens.
One objection that has been raised in some emails I got is that Lanai isn’t for turbines, it should be for pineapples, and Murdoch was wrong to stop planting pineapples. This is illogical. Lanai wasn’t for pineapples until someone decided to plant pineapples. There was a point in time when planting pineapples was just like building wind turbines, a new idea that had an impact on the island. And planting pineapples harmed the island environment in ways that wind turbines never will. The only way pineapple could be planted again is if the workers live in abject poverty and the owner still operates at a loss. The economics have changed.
A second objection is that the turbines will block access for subsistence hunting. This is a reasonable objection and should be addressed.
A third objection is that the turbines will look and sound annoying. It’s my understanding that the plan is to put them beyond the sight and hearing of most Lanai residents, but suppose for a moment this is not so and everyone will see these things every day, commuting between their first job at the resort and their second job at the airport. Again I think this betrays acceptance of anything that already exists at the expense of anything new. Elegant spinning turbines are beautiful compared to telephone poles. We’re just used to telephone poles.
There may be — indeed there probably are — objections of which I’m not yet aware. Let’s sort out the silly ones and give serious consideration to the real ones. Murdoch says he loves the people of Lanai and wants to do things that benefit them. I wouldn’t entirely rule out the possibility that he means it.
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