Fun fact - the exhaust cooling tubes at that old plant dump out into the ocean and create a really warm environment that is rich in sea life and a very popular diving/snorkeling spot. It's even called Electric Beach. https://www.snorkeling-report.com/spot/snorkeling-electric-b...
I lived there for a few years and tried to snorkel there - but my submechanophobia prevented me from getting more than a few feet into the water. Seeing those big spooky tubes scared the ever living shit out of me.
Start where electricity is expensive and/or the revenue you steal from thermal generators (grid support mentioned, synthetic inertia, black start capability, etc) supports the economics, and work your way down as battery costs decline and you force thermal generators to become uneconomic due to compressing their runtimes. Think in systems.
People always forget that batteries also absorb power. Having a lot of renewables means there are energy spikes far exceeding what can be used in that moment. Without batteries, that energy is lost. Having batteries means that energy can be buffered and used later (e.g. in the evening). So they improve the capacity factor of existing installed renewables. Add domestic batteries, EV batteries, etc. to the mix and you also get the potential for demand shaping where you charge those when renewable energy production is spiking and prices are low. And of course even though that is currently not utilized on a large scale, all those EVs could technically provide energy back to the grid as well.
Another point is that batteries like this are not actually intended for long term storage. They are instead about stabilizing the grid and dealing with short term spikes and dips in supply and demand of energy. Unlike a coal or gas plant, a battery can respond in milliseconds and be very cost effective for that. Spinning up coal and gas plants is expensive and slow. And they cost money when they are not running.
And while that single coal plant was able to provide so-called baseload; it would only have been able to do so if it was up and running 24/7/365. And that wouldn't be true. They are very reliable but occasionally coal plants have to be down for maintenance, repairs, etc. and this can take quite some time (weeks/months). Same with nuclear plants. So, relying on that to not happen was never a good plan.
Long term storage is always assumed to be needed to compensate for a lack of this baseload. However, baseload is actually a fuzzy notion until you express it in gwh and gw. Hawaii seems to be in the process of proving this might be a lot less than some people seem to assume. At least I'm not aware of them having any long term storage. They'll probably add more battery and resilience to their grid over time in the form of more wind and solar generation and additional batteries. But if these people modeled this correctly and did their homework, this might actually be fine as is. We'll find over time I guess.
So estimating the lifetime of the battery at 5000 cycles and lets say round trip efficiency at 95% we end up with $0.082 / kWh. (EDIT: originally I claimed $0.074 which is wrong) that the battery adds.
So I'm guessing in the long run this will considerably lower the cost of electricity on the island as adding PV capacity is much cheaper than keeping a coal plant running and this battery allows to install much more and use the energy at night. Not sure whether Hawaii has much wind power but it would seem to be rather windy place.
What I don't get is that this is meant to replace a 180MW coal plan, so we are talking about 3h worth of electricity at full load. Not sure how volatile is the weather in Hawaii, but in Europe, when there is no wind, it can last days not hours.
$219,000,000.00 / 185,000 kwh = $1,183.78 per kwh.
Seems kind of on the expensive side, but maybe it's reasonable for this kind of project -- and there might be some big one-time costs like connecting the site to the power grid.
Seems like there's a lot of room to drive costs down though. Some company could plausibly buy the batteries for $100/kwh, sell a completed power station for $200/kwh, and still make a profit.
Just for fun I looked up what the plans are in the Netherlands (17 million residents), where I live. Governments all over the world are going to start installing these grid-scale batteries in the coming years, because without them we can't really transition to renewables.
Anyways, the Dutch govt has allocated 400 million EUR [1] and expects to get 160MW - 380 MW installed for this amount (so 1-2x this battery plant in Hawaii). But the national network operator is reducing connection fees and hopes to trigger 2-5GW of new battery capacity by 2030. That's quite massive.
Expect similar new installations pretty much everywhere.
There are other types of storage than batteries: flywheels, pumped water storage, etc., and each has a time frame where they are competitive. I’m assuming that with 400M EUR, there’s room for all sorts of short-range and long-range options.
I suspect for the Netherlands, wind supply is the main factor. That typically needs week-long storage; not sure what’s the best tech at this time frame.
Two days ago there was a storm that damaged some generators and left the batteries very low that they resorted to rolling blackouts, as there was not enough electricity for the island.
The main problem with replacing a fossil fuel plant with renewable + batteries is finding a battery system that can hold energy over a sufficiently long period of time and has enough capacity to replace solar/wind when it is dark and calm.
In the studies I've seen the time shift required is on the order of seasons and the capacity required is cost prohibitive.
It may be that the weather patterns in Hawaii are sufficiently stable that it makes it possible to remove the companion base load generation capacity. The article seems to hint at the fact that the total capacity of the coal plant was much higher than the storage capacity of the battery system:
> With 565 megawatt-hours of storage, the battery can’t directly replace the coal plant’s energy production ...
So it isn't clear how much capacity has been lost in this switch. They may also be other changes in the generation portfolio that aren't discussed in the article.
To get a handle on this, I point people to this fun site https://model.energy which allows you to use historical weather data, various cost assumptions, and optimize for the cheapest combination of wind, solar, batteries, and hydrogen to get steady 24/7 power (which would be a drop-in replacement for a nuclear power plant, essentially.) By disabling the hydrogen you can get a handle on the cost bump for handling the storage with just batteries. In some places, that cost increase would be considerable (for example, Germany); in others, negligible (India).
If you don't like the cost assumptions (they cite sources) you can tweak them and see how the optimum solutions change.
> So it isn't clear how much capacity has been lost in this switch. They may also be other changes in the generation portfolio that aren't discussed in the article.
I understand why people are so quick to argue against batteries as a power supply when they are unproven in a given scenario. I think it's a narrow way of thinking that ignores everything we know about the progression of technology and devalues the skilled professionals actually doing this work, but I understand. What I don't understand is what compels a person to grasp at straws and pose speculative "what ifs" after a project is successfully in operation. What more do you need? Does it need to run fifty years before you're convinced?
Do you have any links to those studies? Because the ones I've seen indicate the exact opposite. You only need 2-3 days of storage or so at most.
Tony Seba has some presentations on this topic. His argument is that renewables is getting so cheap that you can build so much that the minimum production covers all days with few exceptions. I guess that might assume some reasonable grid upgrades as well.
Marc Z Jacobsen has some fairly detailed studies for going 100% renewables. He doesn't generally assume any improvements in technology, so his estimates are conservative. I don't remember seeing anything about seasonal storage.
You may ask about colder regions. Seems like the solution there will be
1. Trash burning (getting common in Scandinavia.. you could even do it with CO2 capture as a power plant in Oslo, Norway is developing), with district heating
2. Geothermal for district heating
3. Nuclear for a bit of extra baseload (UK, Sweden and Finland are all building nuclear)
Also keep in mind that to go zero-carbon, we need to make a hell of a lot of hydrogen, ammonia, e-fuels, biofuel/oil/coal (I just read news about a Danish company starting commercial operation of a giant microwave reactor that can efficiently make bio-oil/coal from sewer sludge).
All these solutions will imply a lot of storage capacity. If you're making enormous quantities of hydrogen you're going to have buffers at both the production and consumption side. Production can probably be throttled if needed.
I'm guessing that the hydrogen power plants we already have will also be kept around to serve as backup. There's some pretty serious talk about switching the natural gas pipelines from Norway to Europe from gas to hydrogen. First making hydrogen with carbon capture and storage, then green hydrogen made with off-shore wind.
And off-shore wind is another thing that's getting more common. If you build really big off-shore wind turbines the production is very reliable.
> In the studies I've seen the time shift required is on the order of seasons and the capacity required is cost prohibitive.
Another option is too build some kind of overcapacity with the renewable so that you can avoid using the battery and recharge it even when the whether is not optimal. It doesn't work if the weather isn't stable enough[1], but for Hawaii I would be too surprised if it was viable.
[1]: that's why solar + wind in northern Europe is a dead end like what we're seeing with Germany: in winter here we have very little sun and weeks long periods with practically no wind, so you'd need to have something like 10x solar if you wanted the overcapacity strategy to work, which also make things prohibitively expensive.
Storage is useful at all sorts of scales, from microseconds to years. Interseasonal or even a dunkleflaute's worth is hard at the moment, though we manage it with heat and with (eg) methane already in places. It's happening. Plus we are getting better at moving demand to when energy is available.
This is not a new problem, and there is no silver bullet that will solve it. Just a long sequence of incremental improvements that will make the difference over decades.
In the Nordics, the solution is primarily hydro + wind + nuclear, with cogeneration from district heating and industrial processes. Old-style power plants that generate electricity by burning fuels are largely obsolete, and the cogeneration plants are also phasing out fossil fuels. The solution is within reach, but it took decades to get there.
>The main problem with replacing a fossil fuel plant with renewable + batteries is finding a battery system that can hold energy over a sufficiently long period of time and has enough capacity to replace solar/wind when it is dark and calm.
Synthesizing gas seems like a good solution. With electricity prices often dipping into the negatives thanks to all the renewable fluctuations, synthesized gas should be able to compete with any other base source on price.
Generate gas when electricity is cheap enough and use it to generate electricity when it's expensive enough. Basically a profit-pump once the initial investment is paid off.
I'd think for long term storage pumped hydro would be a better solution. Pump water up a hill and just leave it sitting up there until you need to let it fall to generate some power.
I was curious so I looked it up. Currently, geothermal energy provides 10-15% of Hawaii's energy needs. Given that it's highly volcanic, it seems like this could be increased.
For comparison, geothermal power accounts for over 50% of Iceland's production.
Curious if the differences are physical/geological, or some other reason.
One of the cited benefits/features of the battery system is grid stabilization, replacing the inertia of the spinning generators to maintain a stable 60Hz. I wonder if they'll use that to make the line frequency more stable [1]? And, might this make it difficult/impossible to date recordings by their line hum [2]?
Coal was maybe 12% of their energy consumption in 2021. This is a good change but it's a long way from eliminating all very dirty and expensive electricity sources in HI.
Grid-storage batteries are not only viable today it is also very attractive cost-wise, but not for the reason you might think. They are not meant to be "dumping place" for excess green energy (although they can be used for that), but rather to reduce the need of peak power plants.
Power generation usually has "baseload" powerplants (always on) and "peak" powerplants (can spin up when there is high demand). Peak powerplants are much more costly per unit of energy generated and burn a lot more fuel. Grid storage systems can make sense even in 100% fossil fuel grids.
There is one big exception, if you have a lot of hydro power then grid storage is not as effective because hydro can work as a peaker plant by letting more water go through the turbines. But it depends on the hydro power plant and grid characteristics, even in some cases where there is a lot of hydro it might still make sense
Call me cynical, but I think every state should keep at least 1 coal power plant running forever to maintain skills and supplies. Coal is one of the most abundant natural resources in the USA. In national emergencies we can fall back on it, but not if we paint ourselves into a corner.
I was honestly surprised that Hawaii even had a coal plant. A 500Mwh plant uses 4,500 tons of coal per day - 45 train cars of coal per day. That all had to be shipped in by boat. But just looking it up, apparently a single "capsize" ship can haul 180,000 tons, so only about a dozen could supply a powerplant for a year.
Every time I think of how much coal is used in generating power, I shudder. Have you ever seen a photo of the coal going into a plant? The train cars stretch for miles. All that carbon just going into the atmosphere. We can't switch to renewables soon enough.
To me this is an example of extravagant and inefficient use of money.
Instead, it should have been used to find a huge pool cavity somewhere high on one of the Hawaiian mountain or enlarge one. And then pump up the water to the pool when the electricity is cheap, and release/generate electricity when it is in demand. Stupid and robust implementation that just works and certainly less expensive than $219M.
O'ahu just had rolling blackouts last week because 2/6 steam generators at the Waiau oil plant went down for less than a day. All it takes is one cloudy day and one system failure to cause rolling blackouts across the entire island. If the coal plant was still online, HECO could've avoided rolling blackouts. Some people were out for hours, much longer than the 30 minutes HECO indicated on their social media.
I think HECO keeping their entire fossil fuel portfolio around until they have enough batteries installed across the whole island would have been the smart play, but even with those batteries, one cloudy day is all it takes. We needed that 185MW instantaneous power on the grid ready to go for situations like last week. HECO's total fixed generation on O'ahu is 1600MW. I still fail to see how removing 1/7 of the island's total fixed generation is a smart move.
Given our remote location, you'd think HECO would keep the fossil fuel generation around for a few more years, but utility monopolies don't usually have the public's best interest in mind.
An impressive technical feat, but obviously there's no way a battery (i.e. storage technology) can actually replace a coal plant (i.e. generation technology) without additional generation. Sounds pedantic, but there are many headlines phrased this way, and many technically dumb people reading these headlines.
This is great. I also think Hawaii should explore the new enhanced geothermal systems (i.e. Fervo Energy) that can apparently generate baseload electricity even in places as geothermally inactive as the Midwestern US. Fervo was in fact part of the Hawaii-based Elemental Accelerator's cohort back in 2020, so this must be on their radar.
Oahu seems like an ideal place to do this due to its seemingly higher geothermal activity (at least compared to other places that Fervo can operate), its limited land area, and its astronomical electricity prices.
In this project they are using "158 Tesla Megapacks". Is there any utility level battery storage (commercially available) that is not using Lithium?
I remember a while back a stream of projects using molten metals to create (less energy dense but more affordable) batteries for utility scale. Has anything like that come to life?
This is nice to see. However, one aspect of the green energy push that puzzles/irks me is the tendency to outsource carbon pollution. Citizens of Hawaii might be carbon neutral for energy production, but they are importing goods and services produced by carbon emitting countries/states.
We are lucky that economics of green energy vs fossil fuel-based energy are continuing to look better and better.
A climate change win is a climate change win. But I guess we just can’t let ourselves become complacent and say that we’ve already done our part because we let other countries do our polluting for us.
Edit: to clarify, I was not referring specifically about the provenance of the battery with my comment about exporting pollution. For example, Hawaii imports cars, electronics, building materials, and has a large tourism industry that relies on airlines.
This is true and important - but subtle and easily misunderstood as simply outsourcing emissons .
There is a fundamental pollution that occurs in a coal plant: its purpose is to combine carbon and oxygen to produce heat and CO2.
There is no such fundamentals in producing a lithium cell or a solar module.
We are bootstrapping this carbon free energy system from our existing energy system - so of course, emissions abound - but once bootstrapped, it perpetuates without fossil fuels.
It would be nice if the whole world would transition away from fossil fuels all in lockstep, but that's just not realistic. The energy transition is going to be/already is very uneven. It's going to happen first in the places that have a strong desire to lead and the financial and the natural resources (e.g. abundant sun) to enable that. Hawaii happens to fit all those criteria.
True but we should also celebrate successes like this. If we wait acknowledging progress until all emissions are replaced we miss the good deeds that happen.
Hawaii seems like a prime candidate for a large-scale geothermal energy plant, yet there's only one project in play, and that too is owned and operated by a private, third-party vendor. Feels like misaligned incentives.
I guess the idea here is not that they're lighting the batteries on fire and capturing the heat to spin turbines, but that it's buffering renewables to provide a steady baseload?
[+] [-] whalesalad|2 years ago|reply
I lived there for a few years and tried to snorkel there - but my submechanophobia prevented me from getting more than a few feet into the water. Seeing those big spooky tubes scared the ever living shit out of me.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fe...
[+] [-] dgacmu|2 years ago|reply
- 565 MWh of storage capacity
- 185 MW of instantaneous power delivery capacity
- $219M of financing for the project
Hawaii's residential electricity price is roughly $0.415 per kWh vs a US average of $0.162.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|2 years ago|reply
https://www.energy-storage.news/global-bess-deployments-to-e...
Start where electricity is expensive and/or the revenue you steal from thermal generators (grid support mentioned, synthetic inertia, black start capability, etc) supports the economics, and work your way down as battery costs decline and you force thermal generators to become uneconomic due to compressing their runtimes. Think in systems.
[+] [-] jillesvangurp|2 years ago|reply
Another point is that batteries like this are not actually intended for long term storage. They are instead about stabilizing the grid and dealing with short term spikes and dips in supply and demand of energy. Unlike a coal or gas plant, a battery can respond in milliseconds and be very cost effective for that. Spinning up coal and gas plants is expensive and slow. And they cost money when they are not running.
And while that single coal plant was able to provide so-called baseload; it would only have been able to do so if it was up and running 24/7/365. And that wouldn't be true. They are very reliable but occasionally coal plants have to be down for maintenance, repairs, etc. and this can take quite some time (weeks/months). Same with nuclear plants. So, relying on that to not happen was never a good plan.
Long term storage is always assumed to be needed to compensate for a lack of this baseload. However, baseload is actually a fuzzy notion until you express it in gwh and gw. Hawaii seems to be in the process of proving this might be a lot less than some people seem to assume. At least I'm not aware of them having any long term storage. They'll probably add more battery and resilience to their grid over time in the form of more wind and solar generation and additional batteries. But if these people modeled this correctly and did their homework, this might actually be fine as is. We'll find over time I guess.
[+] [-] dalyons|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jnsaff2|2 years ago|reply
So I'm guessing in the long run this will considerably lower the cost of electricity on the island as adding PV capacity is much cheaper than keeping a coal plant running and this battery allows to install much more and use the energy at night. Not sure whether Hawaii has much wind power but it would seem to be rather windy place.
[+] [-] cm2187|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] elihu|2 years ago|reply
Seems kind of on the expensive side, but maybe it's reasonable for this kind of project -- and there might be some big one-time costs like connecting the site to the power grid.
Seems like there's a lot of room to drive costs down though. Some company could plausibly buy the batteries for $100/kwh, sell a completed power station for $200/kwh, and still make a profit.
[+] [-] huppeldepup|2 years ago|reply
Fat Man was 88 TJ
[+] [-] derekkraan|2 years ago|reply
Anyways, the Dutch govt has allocated 400 million EUR [1] and expects to get 160MW - 380 MW installed for this amount (so 1-2x this battery plant in Hawaii). But the national network operator is reducing connection fees and hopes to trigger 2-5GW of new battery capacity by 2030. That's quite massive.
Expect similar new installations pretty much everywhere.
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/10/09/netherlands-allocates...
[+] [-] bertil|2 years ago|reply
I suspect for the Netherlands, wind supply is the main factor. That typically needs week-long storage; not sure what’s the best tech at this time frame.
[+] [-] andruby|2 years ago|reply
It’s probably the former.
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] davedx|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mathrawka|2 years ago|reply
https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/update-rolling-oahu-outages...
[+] [-] s0rce|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gwright|2 years ago|reply
In the studies I've seen the time shift required is on the order of seasons and the capacity required is cost prohibitive.
It may be that the weather patterns in Hawaii are sufficiently stable that it makes it possible to remove the companion base load generation capacity. The article seems to hint at the fact that the total capacity of the coal plant was much higher than the storage capacity of the battery system:
> With 565 megawatt-hours of storage, the battery can’t directly replace the coal plant’s energy production ...
So it isn't clear how much capacity has been lost in this switch. They may also be other changes in the generation portfolio that aren't discussed in the article.
[+] [-] pfdietz|2 years ago|reply
If you don't like the cost assumptions (they cite sources) you can tweak them and see how the optimum solutions change.
[+] [-] standardUser|2 years ago|reply
I understand why people are so quick to argue against batteries as a power supply when they are unproven in a given scenario. I think it's a narrow way of thinking that ignores everything we know about the progression of technology and devalues the skilled professionals actually doing this work, but I understand. What I don't understand is what compels a person to grasp at straws and pose speculative "what ifs" after a project is successfully in operation. What more do you need? Does it need to run fifty years before you're convinced?
[+] [-] audunw|2 years ago|reply
Tony Seba has some presentations on this topic. His argument is that renewables is getting so cheap that you can build so much that the minimum production covers all days with few exceptions. I guess that might assume some reasonable grid upgrades as well.
Marc Z Jacobsen has some fairly detailed studies for going 100% renewables. He doesn't generally assume any improvements in technology, so his estimates are conservative. I don't remember seeing anything about seasonal storage.
You may ask about colder regions. Seems like the solution there will be 1. Trash burning (getting common in Scandinavia.. you could even do it with CO2 capture as a power plant in Oslo, Norway is developing), with district heating 2. Geothermal for district heating 3. Nuclear for a bit of extra baseload (UK, Sweden and Finland are all building nuclear)
Also keep in mind that to go zero-carbon, we need to make a hell of a lot of hydrogen, ammonia, e-fuels, biofuel/oil/coal (I just read news about a Danish company starting commercial operation of a giant microwave reactor that can efficiently make bio-oil/coal from sewer sludge).
All these solutions will imply a lot of storage capacity. If you're making enormous quantities of hydrogen you're going to have buffers at both the production and consumption side. Production can probably be throttled if needed.
I'm guessing that the hydrogen power plants we already have will also be kept around to serve as backup. There's some pretty serious talk about switching the natural gas pipelines from Norway to Europe from gas to hydrogen. First making hydrogen with carbon capture and storage, then green hydrogen made with off-shore wind.
And off-shore wind is another thing that's getting more common. If you build really big off-shore wind turbines the production is very reliable.
[+] [-] littlestymaar|2 years ago|reply
Another option is too build some kind of overcapacity with the renewable so that you can avoid using the battery and recharge it even when the whether is not optimal. It doesn't work if the weather isn't stable enough[1], but for Hawaii I would be too surprised if it was viable.
[1]: that's why solar + wind in northern Europe is a dead end like what we're seeing with Germany: in winter here we have very little sun and weeks long periods with practically no wind, so you'd need to have something like 10x solar if you wanted the overcapacity strategy to work, which also make things prohibitively expensive.
[+] [-] DamonHD|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gumby|2 years ago|reply
Seasonal sounds implausible to my, but it’s not my area and I haven’t worked in storage for over a decade.
[+] [-] jltsiren|2 years ago|reply
In the Nordics, the solution is primarily hydro + wind + nuclear, with cogeneration from district heating and industrial processes. Old-style power plants that generate electricity by burning fuels are largely obsolete, and the cogeneration plants are also phasing out fossil fuels. The solution is within reach, but it took decades to get there.
Other regions will need other solutions.
[+] [-] soperj|2 years ago|reply
When is that in Hawaii?
[+] [-] weebull|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Kon5ole|2 years ago|reply
Synthesizing gas seems like a good solution. With electricity prices often dipping into the negatives thanks to all the renewable fluctuations, synthesized gas should be able to compete with any other base source on price.
Generate gas when electricity is cheap enough and use it to generate electricity when it's expensive enough. Basically a profit-pump once the initial investment is paid off.
[+] [-] itishappy|2 years ago|reply
An hour long blackout may happen once a week.
A day long blackout may happen once a year.
A week long blackout may happen once a decade.
(Numbers have been made up to illustrate the point.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100-year_flood
[+] [-] beders|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] itslennysfault|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lukev|2 years ago|reply
For comparison, geothermal power accounts for over 50% of Iceland's production.
Curious if the differences are physical/geological, or some other reason.
[+] [-] dtgriscom|2 years ago|reply
[1]: http://leapsecond.com/pages/mains/ [2]: http://hummingbirdclock.info/about
[+] [-] loeg|2 years ago|reply
https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=HI#tabs-4
Coal was maybe 12% of their energy consumption in 2021. This is a good change but it's a long way from eliminating all very dirty and expensive electricity sources in HI.
[+] [-] DanielHB|2 years ago|reply
Power generation usually has "baseload" powerplants (always on) and "peak" powerplants (can spin up when there is high demand). Peak powerplants are much more costly per unit of energy generated and burn a lot more fuel. Grid storage systems can make sense even in 100% fossil fuel grids.
There is one big exception, if you have a lot of hydro power then grid storage is not as effective because hydro can work as a peaker plant by letting more water go through the turbines. But it depends on the hydro power plant and grid characteristics, even in some cases where there is a lot of hydro it might still make sense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant
frequency regulation is something that grid storage batteries really excel at and can be very expensive to achieve with conventional power plants:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_services_(electric_p...
The tradeoff of course is the high initial capital investment to get the grid storage plants built
[+] [-] declan_roberts|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] russellbeattie|2 years ago|reply
Every time I think of how much coal is used in generating power, I shudder. Have you ever seen a photo of the coal going into a plant? The train cars stretch for miles. All that carbon just going into the atmosphere. We can't switch to renewables soon enough.
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|2 years ago|reply
Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32718968
[+] [-] artaak|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billyboy808|2 years ago|reply
I think HECO keeping their entire fossil fuel portfolio around until they have enough batteries installed across the whole island would have been the smart play, but even with those batteries, one cloudy day is all it takes. We needed that 185MW instantaneous power on the grid ready to go for situations like last week. HECO's total fixed generation on O'ahu is 1600MW. I still fail to see how removing 1/7 of the island's total fixed generation is a smart move.
Given our remote location, you'd think HECO would keep the fossil fuel generation around for a few more years, but utility monopolies don't usually have the public's best interest in mind.
[+] [-] alvah|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] danans|2 years ago|reply
Oahu seems like an ideal place to do this due to its seemingly higher geothermal activity (at least compared to other places that Fervo can operate), its limited land area, and its astronomical electricity prices.
1. https://www.higp.hawaii.edu/hggrc/fervo-energy-aims-to-incre...
[+] [-] DoingIsLearning|2 years ago|reply
I remember a while back a stream of projects using molten metals to create (less energy dense but more affordable) batteries for utility scale. Has anything like that come to life?
[+] [-] tcbawo|2 years ago|reply
Edit: to clarify, I was not referring specifically about the provenance of the battery with my comment about exporting pollution. For example, Hawaii imports cars, electronics, building materials, and has a large tourism industry that relies on airlines.
[+] [-] jakewins|2 years ago|reply
There is a fundamental pollution that occurs in a coal plant: its purpose is to combine carbon and oxygen to produce heat and CO2.
There is no such fundamentals in producing a lithium cell or a solar module.
We are bootstrapping this carbon free energy system from our existing energy system - so of course, emissions abound - but once bootstrapped, it perpetuates without fossil fuels.
[+] [-] thom_thumb|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kabanossen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bryanlarsen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dralley|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glitchc|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bane|2 years ago|reply