The reason was their vast appetite for fuel

From Neptune's Inferno: The U.S. Navy at Guadalcanal by James D. Hornfischer.

By early March, those three wagons were ready for war again, repaired, modernized, and joined with the Colorado. By mid-August 1942, Task Force 1, as the Pacific battleship squadron was known, had been bolstered by three transfers from the Atlantic, the Idaho, Mississippi, and New Mexico. By any measure this force of seven restored battleships was superior to the one that had been struck at anchor in Oahu.

Their tenure in Hawaii was short-lived. Only four days after arriving, the Tennessee was ordered to Puget Sound for more refitting. The Pennsylvania followed within a month, and the Idaho for gunnery trials requested by Admiral King. They spent the early months of the war running exercises in unthreatened waters. None of the old battleships would reach the Solomons until after the fight for Guadalcanal was settled.

The reason was their vast appetite for fuel. There were limits on the Navy’s ability to transport and store bunker oil in the Pacific. The success of Germany’s U-boat campaign required a massive redirection of the tanker fleet to the Atlantic to sustain the flow of oil to England. By the time the shuffle was complete, Nimitz had just seven tankers at his disposal. That was crippling to operations, given what fuel hogs the old battleships were. Task Force 1, including its escorts, burned three hundred thousand barrels of oil in a month—the total oil storage capacity of the entire Pacific in early 1942. A carrier task force was almost as thirsty. The Navy had enough fuel available to operate either its carriers or its battleships. As between the two, no combat commander alive doubted which choice to make. Admiral King urged “continuous study” of the problem, but Nimitz vetoed any proposal to operate the old battleships out of Pearl. The math simply didn’t work.

War is logistics.