Honolulu Weekly

A bill which would allow fuel cell systems to receive the same income tax credit as renewable energy technologies was killed at last week’s Senate energy committee meeting, following testimony overwhelmingly opposed to the legislation. Meanwhile, a bill extending tax credits for ethanol production for five more years was passed that same day.

Both fuel cell systems and ethanol have been promoted as green sources of energy, but neither is entirely environmentally friendly.

Ethanol’s appeal lies in its appearance as being environmentally sound–after all, we’re talking about fuel made from corn and sugar, not oil. However, producing ethanol currently requires the use of fossil fuels, so that means that the companies in the fossil fuel industry continue to get paid and non-renewable energy sources continue to be used.

‘Hawai’i has the most subsidies for ethanol in the nation,’ says Henry Curtis of environmental group Life of the Land. ‘You can sell [ethanol] as green while maintaining fossil fuel consumption.’

The fuel cell bill, HB 840, highlighted the potential of cell systems, stating that there is a need ‘to increase customer acceptance and public awareness that will ultimately lead to the adoption of technology that uses renewably generated hydrogen.’ However, there is a problem; fuel cells are also dependent on the black stuff.

In order to isolate hydrogen–fuel cells are essentially batteries capable of storing hydrogen–the cells need fossil fuel-produced energy. The bill would also have given tax credits for all fuel cell systems, including those using fossil fuels.

Those opposing HB 840 focused on the shortcomings of fuel cell technology. While renewably generated hydrogen is something that the fuel cell industry hopes for, the technology currently isn’t here. And no one knows for sure how far into the future it will be before fuel cells can isolate hydrogen without the aid of fossil fuel energy.

Fuel cell technology has other failings. According to physicist Jerry Palmer, the net energy made by a fuel cell is less than the energy needed to isolate hydrogen.

For environmental writer Noreen Parks, supporting the bill was not the way to go. ‘For Hawai’i to be subsidizing net energy loss and fossil fuel, it just doesn’t make sense,’ Parks says.

Parks didn’t have kind words for ethanol either. Like fuel cell systems, ethanol is not a viable energy alternative. She says that the use of fossil fuels to make ethanol and the land to grow crops for biofuel production is not worth the cost. ‘It’s another wrong path,’ Parks says. ‘To use waste or cooking oil to generate small quantities of biodiesel is one thing. But to pretend that [ethanol] is the way of the future, to replace gasoline, is absurd.’

Sen. Hermina Morita says that support for ethanol is largely based on the desire to move Hawai’i’s sugar industry forward, from a food crop to fuel crop.