Sacred Hearts School students traveled to Honolulu to participate in the Blue Planet Student Energy Summit on Nov. 10-11.

LAHAINA – Aloha! My name is Noelani, and I am a student at Sacred Hearts School in Lahaina. My classmates and I got the chance to attend the Blue Planet Convention in Honolulu on Nov. 10-11.

Blue Planet is an organization that works to inform and spread awareness to students about getting Hawaii to 100 percent clean, renewable energy. The goal of this conference was to inspire students to take action into improving Hawaii’s energy sources.

We had the chance to participate in so many activities and to interact and share our ideas with students from many different islands!

Speakers from many different companies and organizations shared their ideas on how they are reducing their production of carbon dioxide. For example, Hawaiian Airlines is working on developing electric planes powered by batteries.

Throughout the first day, we had three breakout sessions: Art, Technology, and Voices.

First, we went to the art session, where we were each given a small square. The squares were later put together to make a beautiful piece of art. Each dot represented a generation after us that would live in the environment that we made.

In the technology class, we learned about the percentages of each source that Hawaii gets its energy from.

Lastly, in the voices session, we learned how we can use our voices to spread awareness around the community (for example, making a video, speaking at assemblies, posters, fliers, etc.).

On the second day, we put what we had learned in the sessions to action by creating a campaign that will help our community to accelerate toward clean energy.

We made a poster of our ideas, and presented. The winner from all middle schools were our classmates! Kalia, Alyssa, Camryn, Katelyn, Presley and Jackie were granted $300 to put their campaign into action!

Overall, the Blue Planet convention was a great learning experience for our class. Thank you to the Blue Planet sponsors, volunteers and chaperones for making this experience possible for us!

As a school, we can now promote and spread awareness about the importance of renewable energy. As John Fitzgerald said, “If not us, who? If not now, when?”