First Hawaiian Bank economist Leroy Laney said Thursday "A bottom (for the Big Island economy) has emerged. It won't be long before job gains become consistent…" he said [1]. "We're already seeing signs of recovery in tourism." Furthermore, he expects that Hilo will benefit from the creation of 500 jobs when Target and Safeway open new stores. However, he did not comment on the pros and cons of low-paying service jobs (tourism and store sales) vs. manufacturing jobs, other than to highlight the creative work by start-ups at NELHA and by biodiesel jobs:

         To insure that our calculation method yields results consistent and comparable to those published by HECO, we verified that for small systems (7.04 $/W, used by HECO, which we inferred to correspond to a 2.83 kW PV size), our cost of PV-generated electricity of 26 ¢/kWh is close to HECO’s 25 ¢/kWh.