Most of the former cane land on my island is still unused. Steve Case (of AOL fame) bought 30K acres from AMFAC (the last one to go bust) and hasn't done much with any of it so far. Thousands of acres in other areas are sitting idle as well. We do have 1 of the 2 remaining plantations in the state (out of about 30 in 1960). Much of this plantation's cropland is leased from the state for pennies/acre so land costs arent't the problem. It's labor/shipping cost to market and inefficient operations. They are going to be rescued by a mandate to have 10% ethanol in gasoline from this summer though.
Not to argue that the land isn't worth 100X in development than in sugar or pineapple. And development is proceeding in areas like Koloa (where the very first sugar was grown here) but not in such size that it would preclude a plantation if economic.
I was surprised to see little solar or wind development on my visit to Hawaii. On the sunny side of most islands this would seem to be ideal and on the rainy sides there seem to be fairly steady winds. Perhaps I just wasn't in the right places or didn't notice... Policies not Politics ---- Daily Landscape
Wind is coming. The BI has a couple of decent sized farms and are doubling capacity. Maui is adding a wind farm too. Oahu has an older windfarm that was regarded as a dog, but stories have been circulating that they were going to replace the turbines and add new capacity as well. Even on kauai our backward coop is now getting serious.
Solar is still 2X the price of oil fired juice. Nobody is rushing to put in solar on a big scale. More likely we'll jump into biomass as the ag lobby is strong.
