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I hope they hired a marine engineer to work out the anti-fouling issues. The system may work great now, but in a couple months every single surface exposed to seawater will be covered with barnacles and algae.

The OTEC guys say that biofouling only occurs in their heat exchangers that are exposed to surface water. I don't know if that is because of the temperature of the water or because of a lack of organisms in the deeper water. But since these data center guys only care about cold water which they can get from the deep, they don't have to deal with the most of the problems typically associated with sea water.

http://www.otecnews.org/portal/otec-articles/ocean-thermal-energy-conversion-otec-by-l-a-vega-ph-d/#environment

Perhaps they could consider a nuke plant instead.

I'm pretty pro-nuke, but the last place I think should be looking at nukes is a bunch of small islands in the middle of the ocean. Even fast-breeder plants still have waste that takes a few hundred years to cool down, and we have very little experience building them (the one in Japan has had an accident or two and never seems to get any closer to going online at full production capacity and the one in France wasn't operational either the last time I checked).

Every island in Hawaii sits on a giant fresh water aquifer - if waste makes it deep into the ground, it has the potential to contaminate the drinking water for an entire island. If waste makes it into the ocean, it has the potential to seriously damage the wildlife of the reefs and spread out across vast areas of the ocean too, albeit in a diluted form.

That said, Hawaii has long been an area where alternative energy research flourishes - OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion), Geothermal and Wind have all had some serious development done in Hawaii. In fact, Lockheed is on board for build a 10MW+ OTEC plant on Oahu over the next couple of years and it appears that "Sea Solar Power" is negotiating to build a 100MW OTEC plant on Oahu too.

http://www.otecnews.org/

The other thing to remember is that Hawaii has the most expensive electricity (and gasoline) of any US state (I remember a litre of gasoline in Hawaii costing more than a gallon of gasoline on the mainland). Thus what may not be cost-effective in Arizona or California may still be cost-effective in Hawaii.

An updated version of the book, "The Millennial Project" can be found online at The Millennial Project 2.0

To read about Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion go to: OTEC News

The exhaust from combustion of hydrogen is water vapor. If this is a more serious greenhouse gas than originally thought, can hydrogen really be considered an eco-friendly fuel?

This is a general misconception, that hydrogen fuel cells will produce significantly more water vapor than fossile fuel cars already do. I found this explanation useful, from this web site (I have lost the exact page). Essentially it says (based on some assumptions) that a gasoline internal combustion engine vehicle puts out 0.14 kg water/mile and a hydrogen fuel cell vehichle 0.15 kg water/mile.

However, if you produce the hydrogen using an energy source which is polluting, then you haven't gained anything.

We have all these wasteful oceans, why don't we just cover them with a patchwork of solar panels

"Wasteful"? Like breathing oxygen? Thank phytoplankton.

And oceans are for OTECs.

There are certainly ways to produce hydrogen without resorting to burning fossile fules. The US Governement has spent close to $800 million over the years to prove that Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) works. This is a non-polluting, sustainable way to produce energy which can be used to extract hydrogen from water.

As it isn't using oil or nuclear power, it is currently out of favour with the US Department of Energy, but you should certainly learn more about it. A good overview can be found at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and the latest news can be found at OTECnews.

There are proven ways of producing energy (and hydrogen) from solar power, which doesn't stop when the sun sets and which the US Department of Energy has spent a lot of money proving that it works.

The technology is called Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC). There used to be a pilot plant in Hawaii, which is an excellent location to turn into a hydrogen economy run on solar power. A lot more information can be found at OTECnews.