Then and Now: Oahu’s Kahe Power Plant
by Estee Manfredi | March 30, 2023
My daughter has been asking to ride a train. I think it’s because we see the Honolulu rail cars passing by every day on test runs. Since we can’t book a ride on the rail (yet), I booked a ride on the only active historical railway on Oahu: the Hawaiian Railway Society.
My family boarded the train at the Ewa Beach station and traveled along the track on the ocean side of Renton Road. It was the perfect day for the open-air train ride–clouds provided some shade on the train cars and the wind felt nice on our faces. The train track passed the back of a few subdivisions, Costco, Target, and some homeless camps with a collection of abandoned shopping carts from the nearby retailers. We also had a really great view of our Kapolei and CEIP substations.
As we left the Ewa area, we noticed a few sisal plants and learned about their significance. I looked it up later and found out that in 1893, the Hawaiian Commissioner of Agriculture and Forestry ordered 20,000 sisal plants from Florida and planted them in the poorest dirt of the Ewa Sugar Plantation. Sisal is a versatile plant and can be used for making rope, cloth, and paper. The plants did so well that this led to the formation of the Hawaiian Fiber Co., Ltd. More on the history of sisal in Hawaii can be found here.
The further out we traveled, I really started to feel like I was being transported. Either back in time or to a different place altogether. We listened to the history of the area and noticed that the ground around the track changed from dirt to white limestone and coral. Around the 22-mile marker (measuring the distance from Honolulu) the view opens up and the Waianae range comes into view. The landscape got drier and we were surrounded by fields of long fountain grass, haole koa and prickly kiawe trees. There was even an area where we spotted a few horses huddled under the trees for shade.
Once we passed the front entrance of Ko Olina, the track traveled along the shoreline of Kahe Point. It stopped at Electric Beach almost in front of the Kahe power plant. Just before the end of the line, I managed to take this photo:
Which reminded me of another photo I have come across in our company archives:
This photo from the early 1960s shows the company’s newly acquired property at Kahe where we built our third generating station.
The company started exploring the possibility of a nuclear power plant as early as 1953 and narrowed their sights on Kahe Valley in 1956. Kahe valley was the perfect location for a large power plant that used both conventional oil-fired as well as nuclear-fueled generating units. Its proximity to the ocean would provide sea water for the plant’s cooling system and the mountains on three sides created a natural shelter.
Traditional steam-fueled generators were built first and were supposed to be followed by generators powered by nuclear fission. That second part didn’t happen. Read more about why here.
Kahe’s generating capacity was planned to exceed our Honolulu and Waiau power plants combined. The Kahe generating station was a major milestone for our company — it enabled us to greatly expand and strengthen our system to meet the growing population growth and residential and industrial demand for electric service. And it provided new jobs and job opportunities. The company was also planning ahead and preparing for “applications of electrical energy undreamed of today.”
Groundbreaking for the first Kahe generating unit was held on Aug. 1, 1961. The unit was completed in March of 1963 with the generating capacity of 83,000 kw and at the cost of $17 million. And the rest, as they say, is history.
The train ride was a beautiful and relaxing two-hour trip that was fun for all ages. The ride we booked was an ice cream ride so on its return through Ko Olina, it stopped for 20 minutes so we could get off and grab ice cream from Black Sheep (chocolate for my daughter) or an acai bowl (for the adults) from Island Vintage next door. My daughter was pleased with being on the train and watching the track whiz by through the break between the trains. We intentionally didn’t mention the ice cream stop so she was jumping in her seat at the stop. For me, it was an amazing trip into the past and to a side of the island that I rarely get to explore.
For more information on the Hawaiian Railway Society or to book a ride, visit hawaiianrailway.com.
Estee Manfredi is a corporate librarian at Hawaiian Electric Company.
