(Tribune News Service) — The Navy said Monday that it's committing $6 million to modernize the power grid supplying Kalaeloa and will work in partnership with Hawaiian Electric.
Meredith Berger, assistant secretary of the Navy for energy, installations and environment, announced the funding as part of a visit to Hawaii to review Navy sustainability and environmental projects.
Craig Nakamoto, executive director of the Hawaii Community Development Authority, said in a statement that "we are grateful to share the common goal of community building with the Navy, and are thankful for the work of our Congressional Delegation, State and County Lawmakers, (assistant) Secretary Berger, the Navy, community members and everyone else involved, because this will ensure the Kalaeloa community has the reliable energy to thrive."
Berger's stop in Hawaii is part of a series of visits around the country between Earth Day and Arbor Day highlighting her agenda focusing on what she calls the "three C's": communities, critical infrastructure and climate action. But in Hawaii the Navy's relationship with all three is being heavily scrutinized since November 2021 after fuel from its underground Red Hill facility spilled into the Navy's Oahu water system, which serves 93,000 people.
The military is now trying to remove by summer 2024 the 104 million gallons of fuel in the underground tanks — which sit just 100 feet above a critical aquifer that most of Honolulu relies on for drinking water. The crisis has deeply strained relations between island residents and the Navy.
In 2015, Hawaii, which has some of the most expensive energy bills in the country, became the first state to pledge to work toward powering the state with 100% renewable energy by 2045. Despite a host of renewable-energy projects, Hawaii is also still among the most petroleum-dependent states, depending heavily on oil and coal brought in by sea to power its electrical grid — one it shares with the Navy.
The Navy has for years worked with Hawaiian Electric on solar panel developments and other renewable-energy projects to bolster the grid. These investments largely continued even under the administration of former President Donald Trump, a coal and oil proponent who expressed vocal disdain for renewable-energy projects and heavily slashed Pentagon programs aimed at tracking climate change and developing renewable energy.
"Hawaii has this incredible renewable-energy portfolio standard that sets the mark," Berger told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. "It lines up with what I am trying to do, what we are trying to do, at the Department of the Navy. Finding renewable, reliable, redundant energy is good whether you're inside or outside the fence line. This is an island. This is a community. This is a place where everybody is working off of the same dependencies when it comes to electricity and water and other basic baseline requirements. And so as we think about how to enhance that, it is an inside-outside the fence line (effort). It is community enhancement as we head towards that resiliency."
But Berger's emphasis on renewable energy and climate issues has harsh critics on both the right and left who see it as political posturing.
Some congressional Republicans have lambasted the Biden administration's interest in military green and renewable-energy projects as an activist project that distracts from national security. But Berger argues that climate change and dependence on fossil fuels are themselves global security issues that affect both military readiness and operations.
"As we think about what it means to operate, and this is especially true for the Navy and Marine Corps, as we see the increased impacts of more extreme weather — too much water, too little water, the temperature extremes that come with this — it creates conflict globally," she said. "The first responders when it comes to these conflicts are Navy and Marine Corps. Being that first response means that there is a broader mission set that they have to respond to, and these impacts make it harder for them to be able to respond."
She noted that the military, and the Navy and Marine Corps in particular, are often called upon to respond to natural disasters like tropical storms. However, military operations themselves require burning huge amounts of fuel.
"We are one of the biggest users, and by association, contributors to greenhouse gases," Berger said. "So as we go, and we are emitting these greenhouse gases, we see the temperature change. So we are actually contributing to the increased mission set that we are responding to. So there is a cycle here."
The Navy is conducting constant operations across the Pacific. Among its focuses are "freedom of navigation operations" in the South China Sea, a critical waterway through which one-third of all international trade travels. China claims nearly the entire sea as its own sovereign territory against the objections of many of its neighbors, fueling territorial and navigation disputes that have led to increasing militarization of the sea.
Berger argued that in addition to addressing the climate crisis, embracing renewable energy would be a game-changer for Navy and Marine forces, freeing them from burdensome supply chains and messy fuels. She said with those tools "it means that we are quieter, it means we are on station longer, it means that there is a reduction in that logistics tail which is, historically, one of the things that causes the greatest disadvantage to any fighting force."
But for the time being the military remains dependent on fuel, and in Hawaii, Red Hill has become an inescapable symbol of that dependence. While visiting Hawaii, Berger met with state Department of Health officials to discuss ongoing preparation for defueling operations.
On Monday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Office of Inspector General also released a report analyzing the sequence of events that led to the Red Hill water crisis and whether the EPA's oversight effectively addressed the potential for contamination at the Red Hill site.
The report asserted that the EPA largely did its job and could have done little in its role to stop the crisis, but the IG also criticized both the agency and the Navy for their approaches to releasing information. The report charged that "the lack of clearly communicated data may cause the public to be unaware of or confused about existing and potential groundwater contamination at the Red Hill facility."
The report also found that several stakeholders and agencies — including the Honolulu Board of Water Supply, Hawaii Commission on Water Resources Management and U.S. Geological Survey — refused to join onto a recent consent order between the Navy and EPA because it required a nondisclosure agreement.
The report also noted that "some stakeholders expressed concerns about difficulties in working with the Navy, including delays in communication, which could result in delays to informing the public. … Stakeholders attributed some of the difficulties to turnover in senior Navy officials and the associated loss of institutional knowledge."
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A tunnel inside of the Red Hill Underground Fuel Storage Facility in Hawaii is shown in this undated file photo. (Shannon Haney/U.S. Navy)
