Could Hawaii be the worlds' first hydrogen economy?

The problem is that most potential riders of HART live miles from any of its 21 stations. This is due to suburban sprawl.

Now, consider the innovations made to date by Zipcar, Uber, Tesla, Toyota and Google. These have trail-blazed vehicle sharing (Zipcar), distributed taxi services (Uber) and electric (Tesla), hydrogen (Toyota) and driverless (Google) vehicles.

These innovations now need to be deeply integrated into HART's 21 stations to get people to and from their homes.

Consider this: the average US motor vehicle is owned for just 5-7 years. Therefore, Hawaii can mandate a turnover of the state vehicle fleet to zero-emission electricity and hydrogen-powered cars by 2025.

Furthermore, driverless cars are ideally suited to Oahu's small area, limited roads, slow driving speeds and lack of out of state vehicles. Hawaii, therefore, could become the first 'real world' showcase of a whole new transport era.

This would put Hawaii at the intellectual property leading edge of the $1 trillion global car industry. It would give Hawaii a seat at the table of the information technology industry. Those are two very nice places to be. The future value of this to the state economy is incalculable

Next Era wants to ramp up utility scale renewable energy generation in Hawaii. This is desirable. Oahu's dirtier energy generation capacity (largely based on imported oil) needs to be retired to meet future clean energy targets.

If NextEra invests in large-scale intermittent renewable energy generation, storage is needed to manage asynchronous peaks and troughs of supply and demand on Oahu's isolated grid. This can be achieved using hydrogen as the 'battery.'

Oahu has natural gas storage facilities at coastal Barbers Point. Oahu has a gas pipeline paralleling the HART route. Natural gas pipelines can carry hydrogen. With Barbers Point as the aggregation, storage and distribution center, hydrogen can load-balance intermittent renewable electricity generation on Oahu.

Barbers Point's also ideal for receiving surplus hydrogen from renewable energy on Hawaii's neighbor islands. This could be delivered to Barbers Point by traditional shipping container. This would be a much cheaper option than an inter-island subsea electricity grid.

Hydrogen not used in electricity generation could be distributed as transport fuel for shared hydrogen-powered vehicles fueled at HART stations. These could be booked in transit by HART's passengers using HART's onboard Wifi.

The US military already is driving hydrogen-powered cars around Fort Shafter and Pearl Harbor Naval Base on Oahu. Both will be served by HART stops (Pearl Highlands and Pearl Harbor, respectively).

Meanwhile, the Hawaii Hydrogen Initiative (HHI) envisages 21 hydrogen fueling stations on Oahu.

All up, the bits and pieces fit together so well it virtually looks like subliminal intelligent design at work.