Will Hawaii’s REAL ID please stand up — by 2013?
Will Hawaii be able to produce the "REAL ID," the security-enhanced card the feds want states to issue, by the new deadline of Jan. 15, 2013? Who knows? We have to say that one isle official’s characterization — that meeting the deadline "is not unreasonable" — does not fill us with confidence.
The problem in Hawaii and other states has been, in part, technological. The state would need a computer system capable of sharing data across jurisdictional lines (remember, each county handles its own driver licensing), and Hawaii’s informational technology is, shall we say, a bit behind the times. The card would be one of two documents acceptable for flying and entering federal buildings, the other being a passport.
A suggestion: Get a passport, if only to cover your bets on this. It’ll let you actually enter a foreign land, which is way more interesting than any federal building.
Feed-in tariff feeds into state’s hunger for ‘green’
Here’s a tentative thumbs-up for the state Public Utilities Commission, which last Tuesday made it easier for companies to sell significant amounts of "green" energy to the utility.
The "feed-in tariff" program, in which an island’s electric utility strikes a deal with an independent producer of energy from wind and solar projects, now has a third pricing tier for generators of up to 5 megawatts of electricity. That streamlines the process of reaching such deals.
The fear from some is that homeowners and small businesses will be aced out because Tier 3 companies will suck up all the room on the grid. They have a point, and the situation won’t be ideal until the utilities make more progress toward a more elastic "smart grid."
But on balance, it would seem any progress toward growing the state’s portfolio of renewable energy is a good thing — and this is progress.