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Your old photo of Gartley Hall at the University of Hawaii reminds me of how I recently "discovered" its namesake. I doubt one in 100,000 people in Hawaii could tell you for whom Gartley Hall named.
I was thinking about why Hawaii is so heavily dependent -- over 90 percent-- on imported oil for energy: for transportation, of course, and for electricity. But why?
It is worth noting that being heavily dependent on a single fuel source for most of a state's electricity is not unusual.
Ten states -- West Virginia, Wyoming, Utah, Indiana, North Dakota, Kentucky, New Mexico, Ohio, Missouri and Iowa -- all depend on a single fuel source for more than 80 percent of their electricty, and that source is coal. It's not hard to figure out why, these are coal states.
Even Vermont, which is often held up as an exemplary state for energy efficiency, gets 71 percent of its electricity from a single source, and an imported source at that. Care to guess? It is nuclear power from Canada.
It would likely have happened anyway, but in one sense Hawaii&Mac226;s dependence on oil can be attributed to a single man, Alonzo Gartley.
Alonzo Gartley was an interesting fellow, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and former Navy officer who came to Hawaii in 1900 to be manager of Hawaiian Electric Company (initial salary, $250 a month) until 1910. He served on the boards of other companies was also an advisor to Mutual Telephone Co.'s board as it created an automatic telephone system. From 1910 he was vice-president of C. Brewer & Company until his death in 1921.
Described in some histories as "brilliant," Gartley's innovations in milling machinery for Brewer made him famous throughout the cane sugar world.
He was chairman of the first board of regents of the University of Hawaii and Gartley Hall on the Mânoa campus, completed in 1922, was named for him, as was Gartley Place off the Old Pali Road in Nuuanu. He was a founder of the Hawaiian Engineering Association (n w the Engineers and Architects of Hawaii) and was its first president for five until 1908. He was an avid photographer whose images of old Hawaii are well known, including a view of the Pali Highway in the early 1900s. (Now in the Bishop Museum)
He was also a horticulturist, mixing hybrids of hibiscus to produce Agnes Galt, perhaps the most widely grown hibiscus in Southern California today, and writing about for "The Friend" an early Hawaiian magazine.
When Gartley arrived in 1900, coal generated most electricity here, but it was getting expensive. On July 14, 1904, Gartley convinced HECO's Board of Directors to switch from coal (then $7 a ton) to oil ($1.25 a barrel).
Compared by heat generating capability, coal was almost twice the cost of
oil. Oil was also easier to ship and store. Oil was probably cleaner burning even then, though it is unlikely that was a factor in Gartley's advice to the board. Probably it was strictly the bottom line.
As a former naval officer, Gartley almost certainly followed the coal versus oil debate in naval circles. Oil provided greater mobility, speed and radius of action. With oil, ships could be refueled at sea, even off enemy shores, unlike coal-powered ships which had to return to a provisioning port, leaving one third of the fleet out of commission at any time.
Unlike coal, oil did not deteriorate during storage. Oil powered ships required 60 percent fewer personnel in the engine and boiler room since oil could be pumped around the ship rather than having to diverted personnel from the guns to shovel coal from remote bunkers to the boiler room.
Winston Churchill made the fateful decision to switch the British Navy from coal to oil in 1911. It was not a foregone conclusion. Britain had a lot of domestic coal but no oil. To secure a reliable oil supply, Britain needed a strong presence in Persia and Mesopotamia, countries today known as Iran and Iraq. But that is another story.
The U.S. Navy was making the same transition to oil, and Gartley likely saw it coming. With the Navy, a presence in the Hawaiian Islands even then, using oil it made sense for Hawaii to use it for electricity generation as well.
This was before cars and trucks, or any powered mode of transportation but ocean travel, were using much oil. Once these markets started to grow, the state was pushed even more to oil.
And once the local refineries were built (Chevron in the early 1960s and Tesoro in the early 1970s), the economy was even more committed to oil for power generation.
Our import of crude oil &Mac246; rather dependence on finished product &Mac246; may give Hawaii some advantage in times of tight supply, since the oil companies have an economic incentive to keep their locally refineries supplied and busy. We do not risk finished product from the mainland being diverted for use by someone else closer to the refinery.
When oil was cheap, abundant, and secure, Hawaii's present integrated energy system based on oil made sense. Crude oil is imported and refined into jet fuel, gasoline, and marine fuel, with the unusable residue and some diesel used to generate electricity.
Hawaii does import some coal for energy today, but if we depended on coal for electricity Hawaii would still need to import liquid fuels for transportation and probably be competing in the more expensive market for finished product.
Today, all this is changing. So-called "easy" oil is at or near a production plateau worldwide and will peak at some unknown time in the not-distant future. Oil will likely never be cheap or secure again as most of it comes from politically turbulent regions unfriendly to the United States.
Fossil fuel burning is causing dramatic global climate change with severely adverse effects on the planet, especially on islands such as ours that are facing rising sea levels and eroding coastlines.
Hawaii's next energy switch will be nowhere so simple or so sudden as Alonzo Gartley's convincing the board of HECO to make the switch from coal to oil.
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