A Huge Battery Has Replaced Hawaii's Last Coal Plant (canarymedia.com) 122
Julian Spector reports via Canary Media: Hawaii shut down its last coal plant on September 1, 2022, eliminating 180 megawatts of fossil-fueled baseload power from the grid on Oahu -- a crucial step in the state's first-in-the-nation commitment to cease burning fossil fuels for electricity by 2045. But the move posed a question that's becoming increasingly urgent as clean energy surges across the United States: How do you maintain a reliable grid while switching from familiar fossil plants to a portfolio of small and large renewables that run off the vagaries of the weather? Now Hawaii has an answer: It's a gigantic battery, unlike the gigantic batteries that have been built before.
The Kapolei Energy Storage system actually began commercial operations before Christmas on the industrial west side of Oahu, according to Plus Power, the Houston-based firm that developed and owns the project. Now, Kapolei's 158 Tesla Megapacks are charging and discharging based on signals from utility Hawaiian Electric. The plant's 185 megawatts of instantaneous discharge capacity match what the old coal plant could inject into the grid, though the batteries react far more quickly, with a 250-millisecond response time. Instead of generating power, they absorb it from the grid, ideally when it's flush with renewable generation, and deliver that cheap, clean power back in the evening hours when it's desperately needed.
The construction process had its setbacks, as did the broader effort to replace the coal plant with a roster of large-scale clean energy projects. The Kapolei battery was initially intended to come online before the coal plant retired. Covid disrupted deliveries for the grid battery industry across the board, and Kapolei's remote location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean didn't make things easier. By summer 2021, Plus Power was hoping to complete Kapolei by the end of 2022, but it ended up taking another year. Even then, it has joined the grid before several of the other large solar and battery projects slated to replace the coal plant's production with clean power.
The Kapolei Energy Storage system actually began commercial operations before Christmas on the industrial west side of Oahu, according to Plus Power, the Houston-based firm that developed and owns the project. Now, Kapolei's 158 Tesla Megapacks are charging and discharging based on signals from utility Hawaiian Electric. The plant's 185 megawatts of instantaneous discharge capacity match what the old coal plant could inject into the grid, though the batteries react far more quickly, with a 250-millisecond response time. Instead of generating power, they absorb it from the grid, ideally when it's flush with renewable generation, and deliver that cheap, clean power back in the evening hours when it's desperately needed.
The construction process had its setbacks, as did the broader effort to replace the coal plant with a roster of large-scale clean energy projects. The Kapolei battery was initially intended to come online before the coal plant retired. Covid disrupted deliveries for the grid battery industry across the board, and Kapolei's remote location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean didn't make things easier. By summer 2021, Plus Power was hoping to complete Kapolei by the end of 2022, but it ended up taking another year. Even then, it has joined the grid before several of the other large solar and battery projects slated to replace the coal plant's production with clean power.
Not Quite (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Not Quite (Score:5, Insightful)
You can do a lot with half a gigawatt hour of capacity. Peak shaving. Frequency management. Load shifting. Power for black starts. They're super valuable. But they're not a replacement for baseline capacity. Not at this scale. Scale it up by an order of magnitude and you can start doing that sort of thing with it, but that's not economical yet.
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Re:Not Quite (Score:5, Insightful)
The so called "baseload capacity" has its roots in coal power plants that were unable to follow the load and later in nuclear power plants that had the same difficulties. If power plants can follow the load, the whole baseload concept becomes moot.
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There is a huge difference between following load (demand), and filling in the gaps of wind and solar, which can drop to near zero without a moments notice. Baseload won't ever go away; it is basically just the minimum expected demand, which was typically met by reliable power plants operating 24x7 to maximize economy. The remaining peaking problem was relatively small and simple compared to the immense challenges that wind and solar create, and that cost should be attributed to them. Dumping the expense on
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Can solar and wind that it spread out actually go to zero all at once or will it take a few seconds fot the weather to cover the area?
Compare that with a large power plant that can suddenly go offline without warning.
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it is definitely not a full replacement for baseload capacity it is supposedly replacing.
That is a strawman.
The baseload generation is not being replaced by a battery. There are a variety of renewables that are together replacing the baseload generation. The big battery is just to time-shift electricity supply from periods of surplus to periods of high-demand/low-supply.
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The thing is, the economic path is quite clear. These grid-scale packs currently cost $300-400 per kWh, but the cells are ~$85/kWh, and look to be headed down to under $50/kWh, and that's with li-ion, let alone possibly other technologies. Grid-scale batteries are currently expensive due to limited supply. Also, when you have a pack designed for only 1-3 hours of storage, it has a high ratio of power electronics cost to cell cost, vs. a pack designed for 12 hours of storage. 180MW of silicon carbide MOSFE
Re:Not Quite (Score:5, Insightful)
The battery is also not actually replacing the power production plant. A battery only stores electricity, it does not produce any (you'd think most people would know that, but apparently not...). The actual replacement is "a roster of large-scale clean energy projects," pus a battery for stability of the network. Saying a battery "replaces" a power production system is idiotic.
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The battery replaces the coal plant in the sense that they needed coal for stability, to cover short peaks and variations in renewable output (i.e. inertia).
They didn't need the coal plant to meet their energy generation requirements, only for stability. The battery now provides that.
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Well, the article says, the coal plant was a base load plant, and not load following/balancing.
However if you change one thing, many things change with it.
So the new battery is now load balancing.
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Saying a battery "replaces" a power production system is idiotic.
Only if the power production system existed entirely to produce power. If it existed to shave peaks then it is perfectly reasonable to say the battery replaced it. Which it did. The large scale clean energy projects were already up and running and yet the coal power plant was still required. In that sense the battery absolutely replaced it.
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cleaner energy
FTFY. Manufacturing these things, especially batteries, creates a lot of CO2 all at once. I say this while having 15 solar panels on my roof.
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I had a friend into mining who argued that.
Right, you're claiming that the amount of pollution created by making one is more than the amount of pollution created by burning fuel for the lifetime of the unit, right? Five years? 20 years worth of burning fuel?
Tell us another one.
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The challenge with English is that it doesn't reflect the subtleties of the maths: "clean" is too stark, as you point out, but "cleaner" suggests midway between dirty and clean. But the truth is that this power is *dramatically* cleaner, not merely cleaner, as the other poster replying to you has pointed out: the payback period for the carbon will be on the order of months
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Which is all they need. They don't need to provide all of the power all night.
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Also, while Coal is a bugaboo on the mainland, there was never very much used on Hawaii. Because: volcanic island. No local coal. The majority of Hawaii's electricity still comes from burning oil.
So: not much of an achievement.
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Rolling blackouts two nights ago (Score:5, Insightful)
The other fellow got moderated troll. But I live in Honolulu and two nights ago at 8 PM Hawaiian Electric started 30 minute rolling blackouts, which in total affected about 120,000 customers according to news reports. In Waikiki we were off from about 9 to 9:30 PM.
What happened is that two base load units went off-line during the day. There was a succession of rainy and cloudy days (it's the rainy season here) and solar systems were operating at reduced capacity. Guess what? Not enough available generation or stored power, hence the rolling blackouts.
There is a big rush to go green and renewable. That's an admirable goal. Keeping the lights on is also an admirable goal. It's just that it does take some time. It's a like a variant of an old adage: sufficient capacity, go green, do it fast --- choose two.
Re:Rolling blackouts two nights ago (Score:5, Informative)
I suspect the commenter above was moderated troll because of general incoherence.
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Uh you're kiddin' correct? Fossil fuel plants are very reliable compared to solar and wind. This isn't even a debate.
I suspect the commenter above moderated incoherent because of being a general troll.
Re:Rolling blackouts two nights ago (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Rolling blackouts two nights ago (Score:5, Interesting)
They were oil-fired, but HECO specifically stated that the batteries were fully discharged and unable to support peak loads. My solar gave me about 40 minutes equivalent output, when 4.5 hours is a good winter day. We also had south wind, and none of our three wind farms on Oahu can really take advantage of them. While this is not unheard of, the two combined with losing two 100MW generators put us close to capacity with near-zero reserve.
We had all the lights and Christmas decorations going full bore, along with my EV charging due to the lack of communication from HECO on the situation; it wasn't until 9PM reading the news I found out there was an issue. My 3.5kW would not have changed much, but I am sure that something like Tesla's virtual power plant in use in California and elsewhere could have given them 10MW buffer.
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We also had south wind, and none of our three wind farms on Oahu can really take advantage of them.
May you expand on details of this? What's wrong with those wind farms?
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They are positioned to handle trade winds from the NE. The vertical geography of the island makes the sites very poor for winds coming from the SW.
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They are all on the north shore, so with southern wind you get more turbulent air. Trade winds blow from the northeast and our usual countervailing wind (Kkona Wind) from the west.
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That doesn't make wind or solar unreliable. Unreliable is the inability to do what is asked of it. The variability of wind and solar plants is known from the onset, as is the life of your battery. A battery going flat doesn't make it unreliable, it makes it sized insufficiently for the purpose.
A system expected to operate 24/7 suddenly not operating is what is unreliable, for that you can blame your oil fired power plants.
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The battery issue was there was insufficient charging energy for it to handle the evening peak. The solar issue is you cannot economically size solar at 5x average production in order for it to be dispatchable on the 7-10(-40) days with bad production.
Re:Rolling blackouts two nights ago (Score:4, Insightful)
You are confusing "reliable" and "intermittent". Both solar and wind are pretty reliable, even given the problems that the massive scaling that we have seen in wind turbines.
Neither solar nor wind are dispatchable, in the sense, that you can't get them to produce power at a particular time; that isn't really a measure of reliability though. For that you would need to know when wind or solar does not work, when it could reasonably be expected to.
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Coincidental mechanical failure happens. This is entirely different than the recognizable expendable failure of base load solar IN A RAINY SEASON. Then stack atop solar the normal chance for mechanical faults and the Emperor's Clothes start to vanish.
I'm all for solar in appropriate places, but to run an economy based on power you can be sure will be there requires OVER building that makes solar untenable for lots of contexts.
I suspect the former poster was down modded mainly because he disagrees with dog
Re: Rolling blackouts two nights ago (Score:1)
Predicting the season is pointless in this context, the problem is a lack of capacity during predictable lulls in sunlight exposure or wind. The solutions are either to vastly overbuild panels and wind turbines which are costly and take up a lot of surface area, build more battery capacity which has it's own problems and can't scale past a certain point, or have power sources that use storable fuels like coal, oil, nuclear, etc.
I'd prefer nuclear myself, with wind generation and distributed battery banks to
Re: Rolling blackouts two nights ago (Score:1)
Oh, I did forget to mention another solution, which is increase efficiency and use less power in the first place.
Doing that in a serious way however would create major disruptions to the way businesses operate and to the way people arrange their lifestyles, short of a collapse and reformation of society I don't see that happening.
Long-range climate alarmist claptrap is self-defeating. Nobody is going to care until it comes to their own doorstep, and because most of the pain in warming is likely to happen in
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Let me ELY5 since apparently you are deep in Dunning-Kruger on this:
1) Fossil plants have occasional mechanical failures.
2) Solar ALSO will have occasional mechanical failures PLUS the known inability to generate reliable quantities of power for great big stretches of the calendar known as 'rainy season' as well as occasionally even during other seasons.
Which of these two systems make sense upon which to base critical, society-sustaining infrastructure?
Personally, I'd rather they built nuclear plants but th
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You say this as though solar can be expected to have similar rates of mechanical failure as fossil fuel generation. But -- obviously -- solar has zero moving parts and not much heat, which are by a wide margin the two most important ways in which mechanical failure occurs. So mechanical failures for solar are exceptionally rare compared to fossil fuels -- maybe a support strut is damaged, or a transformer blows. Compare that to a gas power station, where you need teams of mechanics to keep things maintained
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Oahu does not have geothermal... but we do burn trash for energy. We also have a tiny bit of hydropower.
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Oahu does not have geothermal...
There's a proposal to build an inter-island transmission cable. It would move geothermal and wind from the Big Island to Maui and Oahu, and help balance the grid.
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Yeah, and when the good folks on Molokai see it expect it to be quickly dismantled. An inter-island grid makes perfect engineering sense but is politically impossible. Offshore wind would need to be a precursor.
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Geothermal with water injection is not without risks.
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Unfortunately it is just another example of the incompetence in pretty much all areas of governance in Hawai'i. Recent examples include: Maui Fires, Honolulu Rail, Red Tank Fuel Spill, Kealoha Scandal, DPP scandal, and on and on. This is not a surprising problem, just not planned for.
Poor planning is the hallmark of Hawai'i projects. Take the rail project as an example, they had to cut it short because they started building it out where real estate was (relatively) cheap and by the time they hit downtown (y
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There's a lot of anger about the Honolulu monorail.
State income taxes fund most of it, so people on Maui, Kauai, and the Big Island are paying for the boondoggle on Oahu that doesn't benefit them in any way.
Since Oahu has 80% of the state's population, they can impose whatever they want on the other islands.
That most of the money was wasted makes it even worse.
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That most of the money was wasted makes it even worse.
This is really the only sticking point, everything else is just being cranky. If the monorail helps increase tourism that means more money and that is good for all residents.
If that increased revenue doesn't materialize into benefits for the population as a whole that's where you can get mad at your representatives. Just like I don't get mad at the federal government for funding infrastructure in other states, sure it doesn't "benefit" me directly but infrastructure is good for everyone even outside where
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If the monorail helps increase tourism that means more money and that is good for all residents.
The line was not designed for tourism. It runs from the east side into downtown, it does pass the airport but there are no tourist destinations along the route.
See https://honolulutransit.org/ab... [honolulutransit.org]
It was designed to reduce traffic by allowing residents of the east side (middle and lower class) to drive to the rail station and take the rail into Ala Moana Center, which is a primary bus hub. They had plans to extend it to University of Hawai'i but cost overruns killed that.
The purpose of the Honolulu Rail Transit Project is to provide high-capacity rapid transit in the highly congested east-west transportation corridor between Kapolei and UH Mnoa
The east side has a couple resorts (
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To me that's even better if it's for locals.
This makes me mad but not really specifically about this project because the concept seems good, something we should absolutely be doing but we can all write a list about boondoggle public works and infrastructure projects in the US, it's a far bigger issue than Honolulu.
I predict this system, bloated and over expensive as it is, will be good for the city and the state in general, like the Big Dig in Boston which has actually done it's job, 2nd Avenue line, Vogtle
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Since Oahu has 80% of the state's population, they can impose whatever they want on the other islands.
Not a local but
Even with the monorail is Oahu getting more or less then 80% of the funding?
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Not a replacement (Score:4, Insightful)
Energy storage isn't energy production.
Re: Not a replacement (Score:1)
Uh huh. And when a wind farm goes up you bitch about lack of storage. Good thing guys like you come along so others have something to spend their mod points on, huh.
Re: Not a replacement (Score:4, Insightful)
Hawaii has had considerable incentives to put rooftop solar PV on the grid but they had to dial that back once it became clear that the grid lacked the ability to manage the influx of solar power on sunny days. The fine article mentioned a need to curtail solar power because there more more than the grid could handle. Electricity in Hawaii is already quite expensive because fuel has to be shipped in, and I suspect that their building up of batteries and solar PV will only make it more expensive yet.
Onshore wind power is generally a low cost option for electricity but I recall reading somewhere how the rapidly shifting winds over Hawaii made wind power a problem. Maybe instead of the usual three bladed horizontal axis windmills they could use vertical axis windmills that don't need to be turned into the wind. I'm sure someone has that figured out, I just speculate on the solution.
Hawaii has a problem of not having a lot of land to go around. Wind and solar power take up a lot of land for not a lot of power to the grid. This is like orders of magnitude lower output per area compared to coal, natural gas, or nuclear fission. I can get onboard with Hawaii needing some grid scale storage to manage their grid given their unique situation. What storage is not going to solve is the land use issues of wind, solar, and hydro.
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Hawaii has a problem of not having a lot of land to go around.
This is defacto true because they are islands but at the same time Hawaii has almost 500,000 single family detached homes and has quite a bit of urban sprawl [google.com]. It's a bit much to say "no space for renewables" when so much of that space is wasted on very inefficient housing and street design and so much of it sits idle as they are owned by out of staters.
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Curtailment is a problem with many grids. The UK has the same problem with wind power. We need more batteries, and we need more battery technologies. Both are happening.
The land use question assumes that land can only be used for one thing at a time. A wind farm, for example, covers a large area but a relatively small impact on that area if you are using it for, say, sheep. Hawaii, you are right, is short of land. It does have quite a lot of sea, though, and that is probably where the future for it's power
Re: Not a replacement (Score:4, Insightful)
The land use question assumes that land can only be used for one thing at a time. A wind farm, for example, covers a large area but a relatively small impact on that area if you are using it for, say, sheep.
No, that is not the assumption. The assumptions being made are that a coal power plant can pack 1000 watts of electrical production into approximately one square meter while wind or solar would produce more like 10 watts per square meter, and that Hawaii has residents that prefer a "first world" lifestyle. We can put solar panels on rooftops but that increases costs. Windmills can share land with cropland and such but one windmill can't share land with another windmill. Sharing land with wind and solar is possible but that's still not near the energy density of coal or nuclear fission.
Hawaii, you are right, is short of land. It does have quite a lot of sea, though, and that is probably where the future for it's power supply lies.
Offshore wind power costs more than nuclear fission. If Hawaii has money for intermittent offshore windmills and batteries to provide backup then they can afford nuclear power plants. If there is a concern on how poorly nuclear power plants can match changing demands then consider that there's already load following capacity from their diesel power plants, or if that is somehow insufficient then add batteries.
Renewable energy has a problem of being quite dilute over land (and sea), there's no real solution for that. Rooftop PV and offshore windmills cost more than nuclear fission power plants for the same energy. I suspect that as storage capacity is added to the Hawaii electrical grid the more attractive nuclear fission becomes. Nuclear power plants can use batteries for load matching just as wind and solar can, the difference is that nuclear power isn't going to be dependent on local weather being agreeable to providing enough power.
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I think your 10wm^2 for solar is a bit off. They produce rather more than that -- about 1kW peak, 100W sustained in the UK.
The cost of offshore wind varies significantly depending on distance and depth. It isn't more expensive than nuclear fission in the UK for sure, even if the costs have risen sharply in the last few years because of the cost of steel and other components.
The question of energy density really comes down to whether there is enough energy for the way we want to live. For the UK, the answer
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I think your 10wm^2 for solar is a bit off. They produce rather more than that -- about 1kW peak, 100W sustained in the UK.
The 10 watt per square meter figure is more about order of magnitude than a precise number. It is also the average over a day than the peak. If all you want is low temperature heat, such as for residential water heating, then perhaps something like 100 watts is possible. If you want electricity with commodity PV cells then expect something in the 10 to 25 watt range. Dr. David JC MacKay did a study on this for the UK government and he wrote a free to download book detailing his results. Here's the page
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David MacKay is, unfortunately no longer with us and his book is now fairly old. It is unlikely to be having much of an impact on the current government. Their recent support for nuclear power is, also, a statement from a dying government; there will be an another new initiative along next week; either way, the current government have been in power for a long time, supported nuclear power for a long time, and done little about it for a long time.
The design for Hinkley Point C is not new. It's a copy of reac
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Dunno about Hawaii, but here in the UK, you could put 5x the solar we have on less than 0.3% of land area, about what's currently used for golf courses.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/fa... [carbonbrief.org]
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Dr. David MacKay has published studies on how much area would be required for solar PV to meet the energy needs of UK and he shows it as more like 25% than your estimate of 0.5%. I trust his numbers more than yours.
Clearly it would be impractical to rely on solar power alone for the energy needs of any nation but it appears that people are failing to understand just how dilute solar power is and what that means for resources like land, labor, and materials in collecting this solar energy. All of those res
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No matter how many loving posts you write about David Mackay over the years, he's still not gonna suck you off. Not least because he's dead. And he never said any such thing. And as you say, the UK is never going to move to 100% solar, given its latitude and the large amount of wind power available.
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People are paying for PV on agricultural land.
The costs vary significantly depending on the degree of integration with the agriculture -- if it consists of using horizontal PV, lifted up a bit so the sheep can get underneath, it increases costs about 20%. If it is putting panels over grape vines a bit more. In addition to the electricity, though, the grapes will also grow better, with reduced water requirements. In addition, the generation is often used to replace residential or commercial costs of energy (
Problem solved (Re: Not a replacement) (Score:3)
Great, then we've solved all of our CO2 induced global warming problems.
This is where I get replies on how our problems have not been solved. I don't know what the banshees the scream about global warming want. I point to studies like those from Dr. MacKay on the need for nuclear fission to meet our energy needs and I get people that claim he's wrong, that with wind, solar, and batteries we can meet all of our energy needs and see lower costs than fossil fuels in the process. I repeat back to them what t
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This doesn't make sense. We haven't solved our global warming problem because we are still producing CO2 at an unsustainable rate. Do we have the technology that we need to solve the problem? Probably not all of it, but we do have a lot of it. The question is mostly not how do we produce enough energy, the question is how do we transition in the fast enough way.
Your idea is that we should build lots of nuclear power plants. Okay, but that is slow, expensive and opens us to issues with the supply chain for U
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Energy storage isn't energy production.
It is when the "production" plant is relegated to providing only dispatchable short term energy.
Re: Not a replacement (Score:2)
Energy storage isn't energy production.
It is when the "production" plant is relegated to providing only dispatchable short term energy.
What? That makes no sense. A battery is a storage device, not a generator.
You seem to be equating "production" with "storage" - once a battery depletes, it needs to be recharged from a power source - it can not generate/produce electricity by itself.
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Most forms of energy production also involve at least a trivial amount of storage. A gas turbine has a big flywheel.
The battery is a component of an energy supply system which is what we really care about in this case.
Geothermal too? (Score:2)
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Oahu has no geothermal that is accessible. Oahu only has extinct volcanos
The Hawaiian islands are sitting on top of a mantle plume. You don't need active volcanoes to make use of geothermal heat. All you have to do is drill holes into the earth to tap high pressure steam and run it through turbines to generate electricity. The 80 Degree C waste water can be used for all manner of purposes. The Hawaiians might want to think more carefully about where they want to build the next one so it isn't in danger of getting overrun by lava flows, but fact that Hawaii is having power outage
3 hours of power (Score:2, Insightful)
So, how much diesel do they burn? The night is ~12 hours long, 3 hours of power from the battery and 9 hours of blackout?
What a piece of greeny propaganda. Last year diesel supplied 38% of the power for the big island, and probably more elsewhere.
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Are you always that stupid?
Re: 3 hours of power (Score:2)
I would think eliminating Diesel power generation would be the endorse target, not coal.
Where do you propose putting all these wind turbines? Are you quite certain the islanders would support such a project? A fair portion of Hawaiian land is protected/restricted, held by natives, as I understand...
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The sea. It's where they've been put so far. You build massive turbines offshore, just as has been done in the North Sea.
Hawaii has extremely high utility costs (Score:1, Troll)
So yeah, you can have your battery backed up grid if you're willing to pay somewhere around $0.43 per kWh for it. Something tells me those kind of rates would be a really tough sell back on the mainland, except perhaps for California where they're used to overpaying for damn near everything.
At those kind of costs, it's probably still more economical to put nuclear fission back on the menu.
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They should beg Biden for some hydrogen project subsidies. At those prices, overbuilding PV and hydrogen backup is probably close to doable.
Re: Hawaii has extremely high utility costs (Score:2)
You act like there's a whole lot of unused, unprotected land on the Hawaiian islands where they could put PV, wind, etc facilities.
it's the other half of the solution (Score:3)
Burning fossil fuels (be they coal or natural gas) are just generating power from natural energy reserves accumulated over time. Things like solar, wind, and geothermal are all generating power from smaller amounts of energy that are spontaneously available. That's what makes them lower power density and intermittent - they lack storage.
So adding these battery banks is really helping to fill in the missing part of the system, since you can't just fill a giant tank with pressurized sunlight, or keep a big pile of wind behind the building. Similar to the lower production density of solar and wind, the energy density of batteries is also less than that of fossil fuels. Renewable energy is less power-dense in both production AND storage. It's just a necessary tradeoff of renewable energy - you're not spending down limited natural reserves that have been accumulating for several millennia. So we need to keep looking for space to put these facilities. This isn't a problem that's going to go away if we choose to ignore it.
And we need to stop looking at fossil fuels as a source of energy. In the long term, they're really only a stop-gap for us to run off for a limited time while we get our renewables set up and optimized. It's basically a race for us to try to get our renewables going before we run so low on fossil fuels that they become more expensive than the renewals. The average person doesn't really see this at the wall plug, but it's already becoming a lot more noticeable at the gas pump. It's absurd to be questioning whether or not we should be switching to renewable energy. It's not a choice, it's a necessity, and the longer we drag our feet with it the more painful it's going to be.
Batteries (Score:2)
Who knew that batteries generate electricity?
A battery, even a "gigantic" one, can only store energy generated by something else (solar, wind, etc)...
The headline reads like "a huge gas tank is going to replace your car's engine".
Re: Batteries (Score:2)
A coal plant doesn't create energy. It only converts energy stored as coal into electricity. The storage process takes a very long time and happens off site, unlike a battery pack.
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I believe there's a moderately famous law about this...something something conservation of energy...
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Pity I wasn't able to patent the idea first.
cost (Score:1)
how much did this cost?
how much of the cost were the perishable batteries?
I could not quickly find this information so I assume the cost is out of this world and does not make a case to use lithium ion batteries at scale.
Batteries (Score:1)
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How do you make the hydrogen?
You are throwing away power to make the hydrogen.
Re: fool (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone is blissfully unaware that Hawaii has to import coal to keep the lights on.
Re: fool (Score:4, Insightful)
About a volcano powered steam plants instead? Should be regular enough so it doesn't need batteries and just dump the steam if there is too much output for the power requirements at a given time...
Re: fool (Score:5, Funny)
They have one, the Puna Geothermal Plant. It was partially destroyed by lava in 2018 (lost three wells and a storage building), so it's at reduced capacity.
Geothermal is controversial in Hawaii. Beyond the fact that the particular plant had some noise and pollution issues, you're drilling a hole into Pele.
By contrast, here in Iceland, volcanoes historically were the consequence of the world-destroying demonic fire giant Surtr. He can go f* himself ;)
Re: fool (Score:5, Insightful)
you're drilling a hole into Pele.
Hawaii has many professional complainers and NIMBYs that stop everything. They stopped the Thirty Meter Telescope [wikipedia.org] that would've brought thousands of well-paying jobs to the Big Island. They stop power from being generated, businesses from expanding, and schools from being property funded. Then they complain that there are no jobs.
Re: fool (Score:2)
"Thousands of well paying jobs"?
Really? Will the design of the telescope have been done on the islands? Would the components have been constructed on the islands? Once the parts designed and constructed off-island are assembled on the islands, would it really require "thousands" to operate & maintain the telescope?
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Astronomy in Hawaii currently is the jobs of 1311 people and contributes $221M to the economy [hawaii.edu]. TMT would have been a massive expansion of this.
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Then they complain that there are no jobs.
There's actually a labor shortage in Hawaii.
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There are al
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And? You think Hawaii's current oil-fired power plants are pollution-free? Because that's what it's displacing.
While "currently-active volcanism" and "good geothermal sites" are correlated, they're far from a perfect correlation. As a general rule, any area with "relatively rec
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I think that geothermal in Hawaii might not be as easy as it sounds. I suspect that only on the Big Island is the magma close enough to the surface. The problem is that the other islands have moved relative to the magma due to tectonic drift. But nearly all of the population, and electricity demand, of Hawaii is on Oahu.
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Even at the worst of times, nobody is freezing to death in Hawaii. This isn't Ohio; they'll be fine.
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Maybe Hawaii should consider Hydro Pumped Storage (80 year old tech) instead of hopping on the Elon train.
Maybe they couldn't find place to put a lake on top of a mountain.
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Best I could find is a C grade for the island Honolulu is on
https://re100.anu.edu.au/#shar... [anu.edu.au]
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Just use a caldera as upper reservoir.