Taro farmers, subsistence fishermen and other cultural practitioners in West Kauai have reached a legal settlement with the island’s utility cooperative over a proposed hydroelectric power project there, environmental attorneys say.

However, whether any of that renewable project will ever be built remains uncertain.

With the new deal reached, the community groups Po‘ai Wai Ola and Na Kia‘i Kai will dismiss their lawsuit against the Kauai Island Utility Cooperative. The suit aimed to scale back elements of KIUC’s West Kauai Energy Project, which at one point was envisioned to deliver more than 240 megawatt hours of additional renewable energy onto the Garden Island’s electrical grid each day.

Members of those community groups say that they’re not opposed to renewable energy projects to help address the worsening impacts of climate change in Hawaii. Nonetheless, they had strong misgivings that key parts of the proposed hydroelectric project would further degrade West Kauai’s streams, watersheds and nearshore environments.

Kawai Warren of Na Kia‘i Kai said the project would impact the ecosystem that provides food for people on the west side of the island.

“The people that live here and that live off of the ocean and the land, we see it. We’re not against the renewable energy, we’re against wasting water,” Warren said.

The project, first conceived in 2012, looks to give KIUC a significant boost in its goal to achieve 100% renewable-energy production by 2033 and to save the average ratepayer some $20 on their monthly bills, according to the cooperative. Using solar power, it would pump water in a closed-loop system to generate some of the new renewable energy.

The project also separately sought to divert millions of gallons of stream water from the Waimea River each day through the area’s old plantation ditch systems to generate electricity.

Those stream diversions are what worried the community groups and prompted them to sue in February 2023 to stop that element of the project.

Specifically, Po’ai Wai Ola and Na Kia‘i Kai have argued that the water diverted from the upland West Kauai streams would collect pesticides and other pollutants from the old agricultural ditches and eventually discharge them into the ocean when they reach West Kauai’s coastal Mana Plains.

Their lawsuit sought to overturn a state Department of Land and Natural Resources-approved environmental assessment that found no significant impact from the project.

KIUC eventually cancelled the diverted stream-flow element of the project in December, and in the new settlement with the community groups the utility cooperative agreed to withdraw the environmental assessment.

Still, the delays, uncertainties and cost increases associated with the lawsuit could lead KIUC to cancel the West Kauai project altogether, a cooperative spokesperson said Wednesday.

KIUC is still evaluating whether it’s possible to proceed with the pumped-storage hydro portion alone, according to KIUC Member Services and Communications Manager Beth Amaro. “We have not made a decision yet as to whether such a project will be pursued,” she said in an email Wednesday.

The decision might not be publicly announced for several more months, Amaro added.

In March 2023, the full project was estimated to cost some $200 million. By December, KIUC put that cost at $250 million.

Amaro did not have any updated figures on Wednesday, including how much the scaled-back project is now estimated to cost. Project developer AES would cover the costs, and it would provide the electricity to KIUC via a power purchase agreement, Amaro said.

“We are hopeful that this settlement will send a message to clean energy developers across the state that a top-down approach to clean energy development doesn’t work for our island home,” Warren said in a statement released last week by the environmental legal advocacy group Earthjustice, which represented the groups in the suit.

“Our communities need to have a seat at the table and our voices heard so that these projects can contribute to our state’s clean energy goals without jeopardizing our livelihoods and ways of life.”

Civil Beat reporter Brittany Lyte contributed to this report.

Civil Beat’s coverage of climate change is supported by the Environmental Funders Group of the Hawaii Community Foundation, Marisla Fund of the Hawaii Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.