Electric car goes to Hawaii
DRIVE OUR CARS and save the planet company, Better Place, has just announced that Hawaii is signing up to get vehicle recharging infrastructure dotted around its islands.
Better Place CEO, Ex-Silicon Valley software exec, come ice-cap saver, Shai Agassi, announced the plan along with Hawaii’s Governor Linda Lingle.
The agreement means the Hawaiian Electric Company will work with Better Place to build the alternative transportation infrastructure, including an energy source network of public charging spots and battery-swapping stations.
The electric cars should be hitting Hawaii’s sandy roads within a year and a half, with mass-market availability tipping up by 2012. This brings the Pacific island into an exclusive green-electrical-car elite alongside Israel, Denmark, Australia and California.
All charged up with excitement, Governor Lingle noted, "Today’s announcement is a significant move towards our state gaining independence from foreign oil”. She added it would help Hawaii on the road to its 70 per cent clean energy goal.
Agassi himself noted he believed the prototype electric cars, based on the Nissan Rogue crossover SUV, would be a perfect fit for the island because of Hawaii’s "ready access to renewable energy resources like solar, wind, wave and geothermal". He added it was "the ideal location to serve as a blueprint for the rest of the US".
Yeah... good luck with that. µ
L'Inq
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The Hawaiian Islands are in the northern hemisphere, about 21 degrees north latitude. The common reference to their location is "Mid Pacific".
Honolulu, Hawaii is 21° north* of the equator and none of the Hawaiian islands are south of the equator.

* Links:
http://stable.toolserver.org/geohack/geohack.php?pagename=Honolulu&params=21.30895_N_-157.826182_E_type:city_region:US&title=Honolulu
http://stable.toolserver.org/geohack/geohack.php?pagename=Hawaii&params=21_18_41_N_157_47_47_W_type:adm1st_scale:3000000_region:US-HI
Hawaii has always been big on the alternative energy sources since gasoline is ultra-expensive there, but natural sources like geothermal, wind, solar and ocean-thermal are plentiful.

If you look up OTEC in wikipedia the picture is from one of the first operational OTEC sites in the world (although last time I was there, the real energy conversion was done in the buildings which have been cropped out on the left side of the picture).