You understand!
I was the lead licensing engineer for two different power plants on the big island of Hawaii. We were looking at a quick expansion of the Keahole plant and a long term larger power plant at Puu Anahula (sp?) on the Kona Coast. There were rolling brownouts because of problems with the old sugar cane bio-mass power plants and all the load growth of resorts and condo's.
The North Island Serria Club sent a letter of protest during our EIS process stating they had a better alternative solution to the rolling brown out problem than adding a new power plant quickly. Their sollution was a well defined conservation program of equivalent magnatude to our proposed combined cycle combusiton turbine. Unfortunately, it would take 20 years of implementation before it would reach the same amount of power that our alternative would provide within 18 months. So they were willing to live with brownouts forever. At least that was my conclusion after analyzing the letter in my comments published in the EIS.
They also objected to wind (too visually intrusive and would harm tourism); solar (takes up too much land); geothermal (there were sulfur spills at a well blow out and it was messing with native Hawaiian religious issues); ocean thermal (you might harm fish populations); coal (air pollution and requires too much land); combined cycle combustion turbines fueled by diesel (air pollution and uses too much water); bio-mass (they had tried that and land was too valuable to use on any kind of fuel crop production); nuclear (come on now this is Hawaii). In the end the Sierra Club said that the only thing that was acceptable was conservation.
It was an eye opening experience, expecially since there was an existing shortage of power.