Someone once said of nuclear energy that it was an expensive way to boil water. That was before H-POWER. With a generational cost of 15 cents a kilowatt hour, H-POWER makes nuclear energy (about 12 cents per kilowatt hour) look like a bargain.
And, unlike the operators of nuclear power plants, H-POWER’s operators cannot dun ratepayers to cover their costs. For every kilowatt hour of electricity produced, the City is paid roughly 7 cents by Hawaiian Electric – and it even has to divide that on a 90-10 split with Honolulu Resource Recovery Venture, the Amfac-Combustion Engineering partnership that operates H-POWER under contract with the City. (The City gets the 90 percent share.)
For ratepayers, that’s a blessing. But when those same people turn around and put on their taxpayer hats, that’s a curse. H-POWER’s costs, then, would seem to be as inevitable as the proverbial death and taxes.
Fasi’s Folly?
Are they really, though? Can something be done to get a handle on H-POWER? Or should we simply join Honolulu city officials in praying nightly for increased oil prices (so that Hawaiian Electric will have to pay more for electricity) and wishing the wrath of God on recyclers of paper and plastics, the combustible materials that are mother’s milk to H-POWER?
(We should not forget a benediction on environmentalists, too – whom the Mayor has held responsible for escalating capital costs and delays in construction of H-POWER. But given that scrubbers reduce the environmental damage done by H-POWER, the investment they represent is not so much an out-of-pocket expense as it is a true reflection of the cost of minimally protecting the air, water, land from H-POWER’s emissions. In any case, the City’s astonishing lack of foresight in anticipating the need for scrubbers and its bullheaded, prolonged resistance to the very idea were major factors in escalating costs.)
H, as in Hugely Expensive
What can be done to reduce H-POWER’s drag on the environment? Short of closing it down, a number of steps can be taken.
First, it is scandalous that 70 tons of metal a day go from H-POWER to Waimanalo Gulch landfill. But the City has no incentive to stop this. For each ton of metal that is landfilled, the city sees $54 – far more than it would see if that metal were sold as scrap. HRRV pays that $54, as well as the cost of sorting it out and hauling it to Waimanalo Gulch. One might think that this would give HRRV incentive to find a buyer for the scrap, but evidently, it is more costly to sort and clean the metal than simply bury it.
The City can put a stop to this in one of two easy ways. First, it can increase HRRV’s cost of landfilling scrap meal to the point where the City can pay to have it cleaned and sorted to the specifications of a scrap metal buyer. When the scrap is sold, the City will not only have some spare change in its pocket, but will have avoided “spending” landfill space as well.
Second, the City could establish scrap metal collection centers to pull out most of the metal before it ever arrives at H-POWER. This would save the City the cost of dumping metal at H-POWER ($54 a ton), would save H-POWER the cost of dealing with the scrap after it arrives, and would also allow the City to obtain money from the sale of clean, sorted scrap metal.
So far, Frank Doyle, Director of the City’s Division of Refuse Collection and Disposal, is thinking more along the lines of a technological fix. By installing new “metal enhancement” equipment at H-POWER, he says, that facility will be able to pull out scrap metal, clean it up, and “densify” it. The end product, however, would still be mixed metal – anathema both to de-tinners and other scrap metal dealers. Besides, densification makes sorting out the different metals virtually impossible – much like unscrambling an egg.
Environment Hawai`i pointed out these drawbacks to Doyle. His response was to state that H-POWER, by dealing with large volumes of metal, had the advantage of efficiency. But if the result is still an unmarketable mess, efficiency is hardly important.
Moreover, the cost of installing “metal enhancement” equipment should be weighed in light of the overall costliness of H-POWER’s operation. Before spending several millions more on an equipment upgrade that yields questionable results at best, why won’t the City at least explore low-tech solutions?
A Modest Proposal
It costs the City $70 a ton to pick up refuse curbside and haul it to H-POWER, where it costs the City $54 a ton more to dump it onto the tipping floor. What if it took that same $124 and instead paid it out to recyclers for every ton of recycled goods purchased from the general public?
Some markets for recycled goods already do well enough on their own. Aluminum, for example, could get along nicely without this reimbursement. So, too, can glass, now that the City has a separate glass recycling incentive program, which pays licensed recyclers 5 cents a pound ($100 a ton). (So far just one recycler is cashing in on the program: Hawai`i Environmental Transfer.)
Markets for newsprint and other paper, however, are marginal at best. There is a good, but completely unexploited, market for tin. A plastic recycling operation on the Big Island is just getting under way; it, too, needs all the help it can get. Commercial composting operations should be eligible for the same aid.
In other words, instead of hauling perfectly useful commodities to H-POWER at $124 a ton, why not put that $124, or some fraction of it, to good use in the service of developing environmentally sound alternatives to landfilling and incineration?
We can anticipate the City’s response to this proposal. Even if the average cost of hauling trash to H-POWER is $124 a ton, the City does not begin to realize saving of $124 for every ton of trash diverted from the waste stream. Fixed costs (labor, trucks, fuel, and the like) have to be paid, whether the City picks up 10 tons or one.
That’s true – in the short term. But if the City can make meaningful reductions in the volume of waste hauled in the long term, savings approaching $124 a ton can be realized.
It is a question of perspective: Does the City want its Division of Refuse Collection and Disposal to be forever stuck in the business of waste disposal, a business that increasingly is perceived as environmentally short-sighted and truly wasteful of resources, or would it rather have the primary goal be waste diversion?
Either way, the City (and taxpayers) will be footing the bill. And although politicians may want to avoid making hard decisions now, soon or later a choice will have to be made. When H-POWER’s useful life is over (whether that comes 20 years from now or sooner), will the City be in a position to manage its solid waste responsibly, through recycling, reuse, composting, and minimization? Or will it be looking to build Son of H-POWER?
That’s the choice. To avoid another costly debacle, the City needs to turn support recycling in the same aggressive way it has supported H-POWER. And we are not talking here about costly, inefficient (but, for the contractor, highly profitable) curbside programs that fail every test of financial feasibility. We are rather proposing that government should support low-tech, grass-roots recycling efforts that allow everyone who participates to share in the savings.
If the City isn’t ready to go that route, then citizens must show it the way.
Volume 1, Number 4 October 1990