In 1974, The State of Hawaii created the Natural Energy Laboratory(NELHA) to help the State become less dependent on imported fossil fuels, the main source of energy for Hawaii. The project at NELHA on the Kona coast of the Big Island of Hawaii was to research how electricity can be produced by the temperature difference of the warm surface seawater and cold seawater from the deep. That process is called OTEC or
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (Claude, 1930).
