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.
The Kahe (oil powered) plant at electric beach is still operational. The coal fired power plant that shut down is a little further south of there, closer to Barbers point.
I hadn't heard of the word either but I sure do have the condition! I was a triathlete at one point, but I would take a very large swing around the marker buoys just in case one might touch me... and the grandparents comment of "big spooky tubes" sent a surge of adrenaline through my body. I feel so seen:)
I don't suppose that too many people are terrified of these things, but many (including me) find them mildly unsettling. I imagine trypophobia is similar in that sense.
Submechanophobia has a wikipedia page, which also indicates that there is some scientific research into this phobia (which does not have a good explanation). So it's not a one-person problem.
I thought usually heat like this is regarded as "pollution" and will ruin environment somehow. I've heard something like that about nuclear plant. Although maybe it's a case by case basis
Quick chemistry lesson; when you dissolve a solid into liquid it becomes more soluble as the temperature increases. Temperature equates to the energy with which atoms move around, so the solid can sort of shake free of its pattern and fall into solution. Liquids and gases have the opposite relationship where higher temperatures means lower gas solubility. Gases are already free, so when the temperature is lower its more likely that the bonds of the liquid are stronger than the gases propensity to bounce around.
Which brings us to heat pollution; heating a river will cause the water to lose oxygen (which it already does not carry much of nor very well). Anything that depends on that oxygen will suffer as a consequence.
There’s nothing fundamentally destructive about climate change. It’s the pace and scale of climate change which is potentially catastrophic.
Ecosystems experience “disturbances” all the time. Trees fall. Animals dig up plant beds. Extreme fire and ice kill flora and fauna. These “disturbances” aren’t truly often destructive though: they encourage succession and biodiversity. Seed banks and migration allow new life to be expressed and fill the disturbance.
The problem is when disturbances are coming so fast and on such a wide scale that migration can’t keep up or the seed bank is destroyed. In such a situation, biodiversity and overall living mass can nosedive. You end up with a desert which will take millions of years to come back to life.
In the power plant example, the heat “pollution” likely killed off or drove off some species within an area. But it was isolated enough that surrounding ecologies and latent genes could fill the hole, and in fact drive succession and biodiversity further forward than it had been. That’s fine and good, and not true “pollution” in my mind. Or at least not the bad kind.
It depends where you’re putting the waste heat. If it’s a small river or pond then it’ll heat the pond and meaningfully change the ecosystem. If you drop it into the ocean then nothing really happens because the ocean is pretty big. And a zero carbon source like nuclear will net reduce the temperature of the ocean if it replaces something like coal.
Ironically some power plants in Florida are now critical to the survival of manatees there. Winters are becoming more varied in temperature and with many natural hot springs now unavailable, manatees have found shelter near waste water outlets from these plants.
This topic is interesting especially in the context of beaches and coastal areas.
At least in Australia, a lot of beaches are eroding. Fast. Like, the Gold Coast is basically completely artificial at this point, they truck the sand in from somewhere else on a regular basis to keep the tourism and Schoolies dickheads constantly flowing through: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-20/the-gold-coast-ever-d...
In that very same Gold Coast (and in many beaches in Australia, and I believe other parts of the world), they erect literal "shark nets" to fence off the parts of the coast that people frequently swim in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_net
So my point is, we already engage in a terrific amount of ... I kinda wanna call it "shitty terraforming" ... in our coastal areas. Turning a few kilometer stretch of beach into a jacuzzi doesn't sound so bad to me when framed in that context :)
It is a great spot. Can be a tough entry when the surf is up. But overall I would say it is certainly among the best spots on Oahu for shore snorkeling. And it is just a 5 minute drive if you are staying at any of the condos or hotels at Ko Olina.
If you are worried water will get cooler, let me tell you about global boiling…
Cynical joke aside, renewable electrical systems also need cooling: heat pumps for AC, but also cooling batteries, solar panels if you want them to perform well, etc. I feel like it’s best if that heat is used in heat pumps to warm up water for showers, but there might be some waste left for Electric Beach.
I've snorkeled at Electric Beach -- underwater you could hear the buzzing from the powerplant. Somewhat surreal and I'm surprised it didn't bother the marine life.
On the flipside, its not as obvious what coal burning exhaust has done to other parts of the biome. I imagine its extremely damaging. Not to mention, what it does to human lungs.
Evolution didn't create all this life with the assumption there would be electric beaches. I suspect the loss of this warmth will be a small price to pay to reduce emissions and that other parts of the biome will flourish in-line with how evolution developed life in that regions for billions of years.
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.
Yup, absolutely. Places with high energy costs due to being geographically isolated / without a lot of local energy resources have always struck me as some of the best initial places for solar+battery.
Can you clarify your usage of "thermal" here? Most everything except photovoltaic is thermal.
In the US, we usually name the heat source -- coal, natural gas, nuclear -- even though these are all thermal in operation. And the word 'thermal' does not show up in any of those when we talk about them.
The only time the word 'thermal' shows up in US usage is with the 'geo' prefix, and I can't imagine compressing the runtime of a geothermal plant, it's the perfect base-load plant. Are we talking about different things?
If only the "systems" we were considering were meant to provide limitless and virtually free electricity (nuclear), which is congruence with the "systems" of reducing poverty.
Don't forget to factor in the thermal generators' owners abandoning their business way before you thought they would, decades before there's a viable replacement for on-demand power to run an advanced industrial economy.
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.
Do we currently have enough renewables installed in (eg) the the UK for batteries to increase capacity factor? Is there ever enough renewable production that energy is lost?
Oahu's average residential electricity costs $0.43/kWh[0]. My last PG&E bill shows an average cost of $0.35/kWh. Still outrageous considering the national average is less than half that, but I think your numbers are off.
In the SF Bay area, electricity prices are so high with PGE, it's more cost effective to burn gasoline in my Gen1 Chevy Volt if the price of gas is below $4.50 a gallon.
I thought it couldn't get worse and then I saw my parents' San Diego electricity bills. It seems like whatever CA is doing/has done is really screwing its residents.
That doesn't seem right. Looked up the rates for San Mateo and San Francisco county rates[1] and they're both under $0.400/kWh. On the other hand my parents in San Diego are paying over $0.450/kWh with rates scheduled to go even higher in 2024.
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.
Typically at the moment we talk about a price of about $15 a MWH for Wind and $14 for Solar (last year anyway). So around $0.15 p/KWH for the power to charge and discharge it. Assuming the wind/solar is only going for a third of the day that brings the average price up to about $.209 p/kwh when we take into account battery wear cost. That is definitely economically viable in a very large number of places in the world.
Incidentally the totals work out about the same on a home solar system, my battery is 0.09 p/kwh and the Solar output averages out to about 0.07p/kwh but get paid for export at 0.15 p/kwh.
That's close to my guesstimates of about $0.10/kwr. So I tend to believe it.
The important thing is battery storage is competitive with peaking plants over a period of hours. And lowest cost when it comes to short term supplies on the order of seconds to an hour.
Also the logistics of containerized batteries is great. You need a place to put them and a grid connection. And nothing more than that.
it won’t make any impact on the prices there because it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what they spend importing oil and diesel to burn for the majority of their electricity
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.
Pumped hydro is really great at scale, and it's a shame we don't build more of it. But it needs at least a substantial hill, with the ability to build a reservoir at the top and at the bottom (ideally just a natural lake at the bottom). The Netherlands is a uniquely bad place for them due to being famously flat.
Hawaii on the other hand could probably do some really effective pumped hydro plants. I wonder why the have so many battery installations instead?
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.
Yes a storm could damage the coal plant with some small probability. But now you have replaced the coal plant with batteries + solar. Solar will be disabled by every large storm due to cloud cover. The grid will certainly be less reliable.
More likely that it would affect electricity cables and knock out power in a lot of areas. But that would be true regardless of the power source.
Batteries, like coal plants should be pretty resilient. Wind turbines should be mostly fine as well. The Chinese actually have lots of off shore wind and seasonal typhoons. You can expect some percentage of turbines to need maintenance after that probably. But overall it should be fine. Solar panels basically produce less power with cloud cover. And if they aren't mounted properly there might be some storm damage. But otherwise, that should be fine too. Hail would be a bigger challenge than wind. There were some reports of freakishly large hail stones destroying some solar panels a while back.
Mostly, having a lot of decentralized power generation in the form of wind turbines and solar panels all over the place is a good idea from a resilience point of view.
Wouldn't it have to have happened after the plant shutdown in order for it to coincide? If it happened prior, then it would have been clearly unrelated. If you shut down a power plant and run into power issues down the road, a connection seems likely.
>> 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.
> It literally did not coincide at all, given that the coal plant in question closed in September 2022.
You simply don't get it. You're oddly requiring the bad storm happen soon after the plant was closed down for there to be a connection, which is obviously not the case. One can take an action which creates a vulnerability that takes some time to finally cause a problem.
You're saying something as silly as: the removal of the bolts holding in the emergency exit plug did not cause the hole in Alaska Airlines flight 1282, because the door didn't fly off immediately after the bolts were removed.
If they kept the coal plant operational for when solar is not viable (shocker, I know, we can’t always see the Sun), then it wouldn’t have happened. Any point after September 2022 that they suffer a lack-of-solar-based blackout directly coincides with lacking the reliability of a coal power plant.
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.
I LOVE that site. The Achilles heel of it is that it doesn’t account for transmission costs, but that’s solvable by just picking a single point (ie no geographic diversity or transmission). Overall, it’s the perfect antidote for all the commonly repeated but wrong claims on the Internet (and this goes for everyone).
This is really interesting but I am not seeing how it gets to end price. It's saying around 54eur/mwh in the UK with the 2020 technology assumption.
I can see that cost for the solar/wind itself but seems very low for the masses of hydrogen (and associated round trip losses) that it's suggesting. I have read some estimates that it could at least double the price?
I think the assumption you need to use batteries alone for seasonal storage or that you need a pure zero emissions system is missing the point.
A system that has a gas turbine backup for that non-windy week of winter that happens every 5 years is something of substantial value. Use batteries for capital maximizing daily cycles, and leave coal and gas as "storage" for seasonal emergency cycles, this would be a major, major achievement for humanity.
> 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?
Well in terms of the various capabilities the article highlighted
* dark starting
* capacity
* grid stabilization
it sounds like the battery plant is successful. But the article itself says that the plant does not replace the "energy" component of the old coal power plant, which is why I asked the questions I asked. And it is the energy component that is critical for really retiring base load capacity provided by fossil fuel plants at grid level. Without the ability to retire the base load capacity you aren't really solving the problem. Costs rise dramatically (you now have two energy systems) and/or you have to accept less reliability (running out of power when wind/solar/hydro/battery are inadequate).
I think you are mis-interpreting my comment and being unfair in characterizing what I'm saying as "narrow minded" or "grasping at straws".
> The old coal generator provided three key values to Oahu, Keefe explained: energy (the bulk volume of electricity), capacity (the instantaneous delivery of power on command), and grid services (stabilizing functions for the grid, wonky but vital to keeping the lights on).
> The battery directly replaces the latter two: It matches the coal plant’s maximum power output (or “nameplate capacity,” in industry parlance), and it is programmed to deliver the necessary grid services that keep the grid operating in the right parameters.
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.
> 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.
It depends very much on where you live. Famously, California can get to 100% renewable production with 3 hours of storage, because production is very stable, load peaks match production well and there is sufficient natural hydropower resources available.
In contrast, Finland would need about 3 months worth to hit 100% renewable. Because worst load peaks happen when production from both wind and solar can be zero for a prolonged period, and natural hydro output is limited at the same time. 3 months is absolutely not actually feasible, so there will always need to be some baseload from nuclear or fossil sources.
But 2-3 days of storage is still quite a lot. The recently started OL3 power plant had a total construction cost of ~11B€, making it one of the most expensive construction projects ever. It has a nameplate capacity of 1600MWe, assuming 95% capacity factor (it goes up when it's cold and down when it's warm), if you spent it's construction cost building grid-scale batteries, assuming the lowest cost of a completed battery project anywhere in the world, you'd get something like 27 hours of storage. So even if the primary production was free, if you need more than that, you'd be better off building the world's largest and most expensive nuclear power plant instead of batteries + renewables.
> 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.
He was a coauthor on a recent review article on 100% RE energy systems. One conclusion of the review article is that e-fuels are very useful, and that with e-fuels costs are similar to those of energy systems based on fossil fuels.
E-fuels (like hydrogen) inherently provide very long term storage.
gives a crazy low cost for a solar + battery plant that assumes storage for an hour and a half which is certainly too little. When I split out their generation and storage numbers and put in the assumption that 12 hours of storage gets you through the night the price is getting in the same range as gas turbine power plants.
There's the seasonal problem too, the answer to that is some combination of building more solar capacity or adding huge amounts of storage. I'd estimate that the daily insolation varies by a factor of 2 or so in NY
so you could build maybe twice the solar capacity and have enough generation in the winter. Judged that way the system cost is creeping in the direction of what nuclear energy costs, though you've got a lot of "free" electricity in the summer although that could be "free as in puppy". Hypothetically you could do something like desalinate seawater and pump it uphill into reservoirs but operating any kind of industrial factory intermittently is going to be murder for capital and operating costs. There is this idea
where you could smooth out diurnal variation in a "hydrogen economy" factory by overbuilding electrolyzers, but to take advantage of "free" summer electricity you might have to lay off all your workers half the year not to mention building surplus transmission infrastructure.
Of course it takes detailed modeling of supply and demand to get good cost estimates for renewable plus storage systems and one thing I find irksome about that EIA report is that it quotes one number for a solar energy plant which is just wrong because the exact same solar plant will product a lot more power in Nevada and it will in Wisconsin. Many people are quoting these numbers and not really aware that they are discrediting themselves and the renewable energy cause because quoting a number that doesn't depend on time and place just violates common sense.
> 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.
> so you'd need to have something like 10x solar if you wanted the overcapacity strategy to work, which also make things prohibitively expensive.
In the short-term, gas backup for such scenarios (which are relatively rare, and during which renewables will still operate at some non-100% fraction of the required energy) seems like it might be a reasonable option: we could probably get to (pulling numbers out of thin air) 95% renewable generation or something that way.
Longer term, we'll definitely need some kind of long-term storage though. Perhaps synthetic fuel driven by overcapacity renewables during peak generation times might be an option here?
Germany can do it with a combination of wind, solar, batteries, and hydrogen.
The green hydrogen is crucial, to deal with Dunkelflauten and to some extent seasonality. Germany has ample salt formations for cheap hydrogen storage. At the site I linked elsewhere in these comments, the solution for 24/7 power from RE is nearly doubled in Germany if green hydrogen is omitted.
Germany is suffering now from the decision to pay for the 2009-2012 solar builds using long term high rates. When that ends (2032?) the costs should come down a lot. Building out solar now should be much less expensive.
We don't know if 10x will be prohibitively expensive going forward. It can also enable new kinds of uses of electricity we don't have today, offsetting the cost of build-out.
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.
In late winter/early spring sometimes the trade winds get "funky" and there will be days where there is absolutely no wind at all and it is a little eerie.
Not sure about calm (I feel like there's pretty much always some wind), but the rainy season brings lots of clouds. And even outside the rainy season there are days cloudy enough to impact solar generation.
>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.
The problem is that is non-tropical regions, in winter you get less sun and long periods (3 weeks is routine in European winter) with no winds so you need to be able to supply enough power for a very big amount of time.
Solar and wind generation themselves are seasonal and don't match the seasonal patterns of demand. So you need to time shift across seasons if you don't have the instantaneous (base load) capacity available all the time.
You might say, well, just build more windmills or solar farms. Doesn't help when it is dark and calm. Your "overbuild" is useless in that situation. So you need storage (or other base load generation, fossil or nuclear).
In this study, it is estimated that Germany and California both need about 25TWh of storage to time shift energy supplied by intermittent sources to other parts of the year. The study claims $5 trillion to purchase batteries to store that much energy.
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.
Most electrical consumption is on an island two islands over from the volcanoes. Probably also geological: hot springs are not really a thing in Hawaii.
It does seem like it would be possible to lay a cable to transmit the power from the Big Island to Oahu. My reference for that is the plan to lay a cable to transmit power from Australia to Singapore.
The real crux behind geothermal is hot water. Hawaii is arid and the areas where geothermal does occur is on the "Big Island" and are often considered sacred by Native Hawaiians.
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]?
It's interesting, I've heard lots of tales about how we need the spinning mass to stabilise the grid in way which apparently solar, for example, doesn't.
It's not immediately obvious to me whether batteries do or don't provide this capability. I know there are some projects where they are introducing giant flywheels with motor generators (and others where mothballed power plants are run at tickover, though I think this might be more for active / reactive power control), are these just an alternative to batteries with much lower tech or is there something intrinsic about a rotating generator which is hard to reproduce?
The inverters attached to solar or batteries can provide frequency support and even reactive power. They just need to have the smarts to do it at the right frequency, and standards for that have come about in recent years. In the early days, there wasn't much need so by KISS standards it would have been the wrong choice to start with grid-forming inverter design.
People who complain about the lack of spinning mass do not have much knowledge about AC power, even if they understand the prior forms of our grid very well. Classic mistake of is vs. ought.
I work with grid storage battery systems (as a software engineer, so no expert on the physics)
> It's interesting, I've heard lots of tales about how we need the spinning mass to stabilise the grid in way which apparently solar, for example, doesn't.
This is false and a common misconception according to a coworker of mine, having a spinning mass to stabilise the grid is one way of keeping frequency stable, but not the only way. In fact batteries are way better than spinning mass at stabilising frequency. The problem with batteries is that they need a lot of software systems to kick in and kick out of the grid and those can be quite complicated and costly to develop, but once they are in place they will stabilise the grid way better than a giant flywheel.
This is so commonly misunderstood that apparently Australia (where my coworker used to work) had some rules at the central electricity provider agency to enforce certain minimum amounts of spinning mass in the grid. So it seems it can also be a matter of regulations not catching up with technology.
In the article: "The Kapolei project provides a first line of defense, called “synthetic inertia,” responding to and correcting grid deviations in real time."
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.
Hi cynical! Overhead is the sun - it is a massively more abundant energy resource than coal could ever be. It has run for billions of years and has at least one more left in it. Coal is a finite resource and not a very pleasant one to mine.
Solar generation is generally quite dispersed instead of few monolithic coal plants.
That's just solar. There is also wind and wave, geo-thermal and many more ways to generate electricity (power). That's diversification and that surely is easier to defend.
I would suggest that relying on one power source is painting yourself into a corner and then drinking the paint.
I'm a big fan of solar and renewables, but at the same time, in the past there have been massive volcanic eruptions that have blocked out the sun for extended periods of time [1]. So in my mind, the post you were responding to makes a very good point.
Technology-wise, isn't it a lot easier to build a coal plant than it is to build PV panels? Obviously this is not a problem right now, but imagine a disaster scenario where a good amount of high-tech industry is non-operational. Or even a geopolitical crisis where we lose access to enough of the raw materials or manufacturing capacity to make the panels.
(Does the US even manufacture PV panels? Or are they mostly -- or even all -- built overseas?)
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.
"The old coal generator provided three key values to Oahu, Keefe explained: energy (the bulk volume of electricity), capacity (the instantaneous delivery of power on command), and grid services (stabilizing functions for the grid, wonky but vital to keeping the lights on). The battery directly replaces the latter two: It matches the coal plant’s maximum power output (or “nameplate capacity,” in industry parlance), and it is programmed to deliver the necessary grid services that keep the grid operating in the right parameters."
Energy without batteries must be produced when it's consumed. Imagine your cellphone without a battery: it would be connected to a power plant that must be started on demand, and stopped when your phone is not in use.
Now imagine your phone gets a battery, that can be charged with a small solar panel when you're not using the phone. This way, you can use the phone even when the sun isn't shinning or at dark hours, as long as the solar panel and the sunny hours at least match you consumption.
The additional generation you call for comes from the windy/sunny times when people are not consuming 100% of production, so they charge the batteries instead.
In fact, coal can be thought as a storage of energy, not a source: it was stored from sun energy some million years ago when nobody was consuming it, so we can recover some of that energy today by pluging "the coal batteries" in a furnace.
I’m aware the battery in Hawaii uses additional generation, it’s mentioned in the article. That point was the obviously-misleading headline, which is not the first I’ve seen for this type of installation.
With the prevalence of cell phones and laptops in our life, accusing somebody of not understanding how a battery works is tantamount to an insult like calling them a man idiot. Who does not have to deal with charging their batteries continuously?
Further, it seems a bit hypocritical to complain about others reacting only to the headline without reading the article, when that's exactly what you have done.
Your assumptions are incorrect, and it’s perfectly valid to point out that a battery is not, in fact, a generator, when there are many headlines such as this one confusing the issue. There are many man idiots, whatever that means, making assumptions.
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?
Sodium Ion is looking promising for a cheaper alternative, with currently lower energy density than LFP (lithium iron phosphate) and NMC (high nickel li ion). BYD is trying to scale sodium ion, but based on analysis (I’m open to other points of view) from The Limiting Factor on YouTube, it won’t be at the same scale as lithium or make a meaningful dent in world battery production in GWh units until the late 2020s or early 2030s.
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.
Carbon emission is a poor and (purposefully) misleading idea of pollution. Lithium batteries may produce less carbon emissions over their lifetimes, but mining that lithium and producing the batteries is still incredibly ecologically damaging.[0]
Companies, in particular, adore the carbon-centric pollution angle because it allows them to ignore the physical pollution they cause every day, while profiting off of ESG. Microsoft alone will have caused an estimated 240,000,000 PCs to have been junked.[1]
My mind goes to the question of what chemical byproducts come out of the manufacture of batteries or PVs. Maybe it’s not CO2, but something else. Maybe it’s easier to deal with. And maybe it’s a good tradeoff, or just in certain quantities, but if so what is that tipping point? I don’t know where to look for this kind of information.
Not really: batteries and solar need to be replaced more often that coal plant. The current and foreseen material sourcing, production and logistics for solar and batteries rely on a ton of steel which needs… coal! Coal-free steel already exist but is much more expensive, and will very probably remain expensive for a long time.
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.
The country leading the renewables transition right now is China. Since they’re also the country that (not coincidentally) builds everything, outsourcing goods manufacturing to them seems like an okay bet, for the climate at least. (And yes, I know they’re building coal, but their emissions are still set to peak because they’re building more renewables than industry can consume while paying to idle coal plants.)
Something I see so much in local politics is that things don't all happen in a nicely coordinated fashion like one might want. Say, building some denser housing with more transit. But people telling you to wait until everything lines up 'just so' most likely want neither. Things happen in fits and starts in the real world.
I find it interesting that places like Iowa, Texas, and Kansas are leading the transition in the US despite none being places anything thinks associated with environmentalism. While states you might expect to care are way behind. Hawaii has had expensive energy all along and was an early installer of wind, but somehow is still way behind.
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?
But let’s at least be honest about the necessity to massively overbuild intermittent sources (and expensive storage) to provide reliability when we compare $/MWh.
I mean, you're commenting on a post about a battery which can help to solve this problem (albeit this battery alone probably doesn't entirely solve it).
this is misleading at best, outright disinformation at worst. coal generation accounted for only 7% of hawaii’s electricity. the vast majority, 70%, is diesel and oil generators. just like any other island in the world. once again we demonstrate how worthless utility scale batteries are in the grand scheme of things
> The utility also requested “black-start capability.” If a disaster, like a cyclone or earthquake, knocks out the grid completely, Hawaiian Electric needs a power source to restart it. The Kapolei batteries are programmed to hold some energy in reserve for that purpose. Plus Power located the project near a substation connected to three other power plants so the battery “can be AAA to jump-start those other plants,” Keefe said.
Anyone who has played enough Factorio knows just how important that can be.
Yeeeep. I usually end up creating isolated grids with circuit networks and banks of capacitors to make it so the power production (and fuel production to feed it) can never shut down...
Dyson Sphere Program (an amazing factory builder game, if you haven't tried it) has similar problems -- but no circuit networks. I haven't yet figured out how to make a robust power generation system that doesn't rely on just alerting the operator that something is going wrong...
Yeah, I've recently started another run of Space Ex.
Currently have an isolated grid with some solar/batteries for enough boilers to kick start everything.
As I scale, I'll be using a circuit network to set up a steam battery that'll be able to kick start everything and take the hit on surges of power requirements (looking at you Coronal Mass Ejections).
Batteries can't replace energy generation, it still needs to be generated to be stored. Though it does give you more control over how you generate the power.
Fossil fuels are often used to generate electricity for batteries, which just moves the problem elsewhere. For example, you may be charging your EV with energy generated by a Coal plant.
Similarly, outsourcing manufacturing often moves pollution from domestic to international. If a country heavily consumes goods imported from somewhere like China, they are part of the cause of those greenhouse gases. The pollution has simply been outsourced
Not trying to make a specific point, but often people only think one level deep about these things.
I would say this argument is only thinking one level deep.
If you charge your EV with a coal plant, is that better or worse than a gas car? (It's better.) Are EVs actually being charged with only coal power? (No.) Do we have the technology to replace polluting power plants? (Yes.) Are renewables cheaper than fossil fuels? (Yes.) Do gas cars have the ability to get more efficient as power generation changes? (No.) Do EVs? (Yes.)
Does manufacturing overseas contribute to global warming? (Of course.) If you factor this in, how do US carbon emissions look? (They're going down, both total and per-capita.)
> but often people only think one level deep about these things.
In my experiences the ones who care about zero-carbon and renewable energy have thought very deeply about these things.
> Fossil fuels are often used to generate electricity for batteries
Yeah, but renewables are already cheaper that fossil fuels in most cases. And charging batteries is one of the most flexible loads for a renewable grid. I don't care if I charge my car on monday or friday.
> For example, you may be charging your EV with energy generated by a Coal plant.
This example is just completely irrelevant by now. Coal is dead.
Even then, it's much better to move the pollution away from where people live, and where you have an opportunity to clean the exhaust gases. (if your country cares about those kinds of things). It's also more CO2-efficient, even when not counting future battery recycling.
> If a country heavily consumes goods imported from somewhere like China, they are part of the cause of those greenhouse gases.
Fair point, but in the context of batteries I'm not too worried. Both USA and EU are now pretty damn serious about on-shoring on near-shoring both material production and battery production.
Also, we now have battery recycling at a commercial scale, which is far more energy and resource efficient.
We WILL have a couple of decades where the green transition will be quite resource and carbon intensive. But as the first big waves of EVs and grid energy batteries start to get recycled that resource use will fall off a cliff.
I made no indication that renewables weren't a desirable goal, or that we shouldn't pursue them. I made no arguments against renewables.
Simply stating facts that are often overlooked. Very often policy focuses on the visible wins while ignoring the "shuffling" of externalities.
If a policy passes that lowers emissions in the USA but increases them in China as a result (due to offshoring or other means), you'll only hear about the first part
Read the article. They explain exactly how batteries can replace (yes, replace) the coal plant. In short: renewables have a hard time matching real-time demand. Clouds come. Wind dies down. What do you do? So in the past they needed that coal plant to add extra generating capacity, when needed. But now, with the batteries, the battery can store the surplus of renewables not instantly needed. Then when clouds come or wind dies done, the energy flow reverses and batteries deliver this surplus, hence smoothing supply.
Right, which is why we have renewables to generate power. The coal plant was there to cover any potential power shortfall on overcast days or unexpected late night power needs.
This is a mostly solved problem, it’s just a matter of building out the infrastructure.
What? No. They're replacing it with solar generation.
> With 565 megawatt-hours of storage, the battery can’t directly replace the coal plant’s energy production, but it works with the island’s bustling solar sector to fill that role. “We’re enabling the grid to add more clean renewable energy to the system to replace the energy from the coal plant,” Keefe said.
This article never speaks to costs, as always with green energy, it's only green because the government funds it. How many years can a coal power plant last? How many years do these batteries last. What are the mineral inputs into these batteries? What are the inputs, costs and "renewable" properties of "green" energy? There are none. The batteries end up in toxic waste dumps. All the solar panels end up in the garage.
Stop chasing vanity and use common sense for utilities. How has this impacted their key metrics like reliability, what happens if there is ash in the air for a month and no solar can be provided? They took a proven, reliable production system and turned it into the latest JavaScript framework. Good luck.
Stop making up non-sense that have zero basis in reality.
The costs are fairly well captured in LCOE of these various sources of electricity. Questions like "How many year it lasts" is especially well captured.
> How many years do these batteries last.
For grid storage? Probably 1-3 decades. They'll have excellent battery management systems, chemistries that are optimized for longevity rather than energy density, they won't be fast charging/discharging, they'll probably never be discharged to 0%, mostly above 20% probably, which is also very gentle for batteries.
My EV battery is on its 8th year now with very little degradation. That's with primitive cooling (air cooling), older battery chemistry and fairly many charge/discharge cycles, including many deep discharges, since the EV battery is tiny (27kwH).
> The batteries end up in toxic waste dumps.
Completely false. Battery recycling is already happening at massive commercial scale, and reaching near 100% recycling. From consumer products like Apple iPhones to car and grid batteries. Car and grid batteries are particularly easy to recycle since you get huge bulk of identical cells.
Think about how insane it is to even consider this a disadvantage for batteries. How insanely many tonnes of coal will a coal power plant have burned in a decade? All that mining is gone forever. With battery materials mining, we'll eventually have enough materials for all the batteries we could ever need.
> All the solar panels end up in the garage.
Solar panels are a bit trickier, but that's also starting to ramp up at a commercial scale.
EU is already well ahead with regulations targeting recycling of these things. And given what's already demonstrated commercially, there's no reason to think 100% efficient recycling won't be the reality in a decade or so.
> what happens if there is ash in the air for a month and no solar can be provided?
Over a whole continent?
In France several of the supposedly reliable nuclear reactors went down at the same time a little while back. Huge amount of power went offline. They got by just fine with the help of their UK and German neighbors.
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.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fe...
The Kahe (oil powered) plant at electric beach is still operational. The coal fired power plant that shut down is a little further south of there, closer to Barbers point.
It also shut down over a year ago (9/1/22).
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I didn't know what submechanophobia was , Is it really common to have a word for itself ?
I hadn't heard of the word either but I sure do have the condition! I was a triathlete at one point, but I would take a very large swing around the marker buoys just in case one might touch me... and the grandparents comment of "big spooky tubes" sent a surge of adrenaline through my body. I feel so seen:)
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There's a series of popular subreddits with similar names that I think made the terms more common.
https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia/
https://www.reddit.com/r/thalassophobia/
I don't suppose that too many people are terrified of these things, but many (including me) find them mildly unsettling. I imagine trypophobia is similar in that sense.
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Submechanophobia has a wikipedia page, which also indicates that there is some scientific research into this phobia (which does not have a good explanation). So it's not a one-person problem.
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You should check out the subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia/
Google Maps location: https://maps.app.goo.gl/d6AchooL8MFjxmoj6
I thought usually heat like this is regarded as "pollution" and will ruin environment somehow. I've heard something like that about nuclear plant. Although maybe it's a case by case basis
Quick chemistry lesson; when you dissolve a solid into liquid it becomes more soluble as the temperature increases. Temperature equates to the energy with which atoms move around, so the solid can sort of shake free of its pattern and fall into solution. Liquids and gases have the opposite relationship where higher temperatures means lower gas solubility. Gases are already free, so when the temperature is lower its more likely that the bonds of the liquid are stronger than the gases propensity to bounce around.
Which brings us to heat pollution; heating a river will cause the water to lose oxygen (which it already does not carry much of nor very well). Anything that depends on that oxygen will suffer as a consequence.
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There’s nothing fundamentally destructive about climate change. It’s the pace and scale of climate change which is potentially catastrophic.
Ecosystems experience “disturbances” all the time. Trees fall. Animals dig up plant beds. Extreme fire and ice kill flora and fauna. These “disturbances” aren’t truly often destructive though: they encourage succession and biodiversity. Seed banks and migration allow new life to be expressed and fill the disturbance.
The problem is when disturbances are coming so fast and on such a wide scale that migration can’t keep up or the seed bank is destroyed. In such a situation, biodiversity and overall living mass can nosedive. You end up with a desert which will take millions of years to come back to life.
In the power plant example, the heat “pollution” likely killed off or drove off some species within an area. But it was isolated enough that surrounding ecologies and latent genes could fill the hole, and in fact drive succession and biodiversity further forward than it had been. That’s fine and good, and not true “pollution” in my mind. Or at least not the bad kind.
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It depends where you’re putting the waste heat. If it’s a small river or pond then it’ll heat the pond and meaningfully change the ecosystem. If you drop it into the ocean then nothing really happens because the ocean is pretty big. And a zero carbon source like nuclear will net reduce the temperature of the ocean if it replaces something like coal.
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Ironically some power plants in Florida are now critical to the survival of manatees there. Winters are becoming more varied in temperature and with many natural hot springs now unavailable, manatees have found shelter near waste water outlets from these plants.
This topic is interesting especially in the context of beaches and coastal areas.
At least in Australia, a lot of beaches are eroding. Fast. Like, the Gold Coast is basically completely artificial at this point, they truck the sand in from somewhere else on a regular basis to keep the tourism and Schoolies dickheads constantly flowing through: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-20/the-gold-coast-ever-d...
In that very same Gold Coast (and in many beaches in Australia, and I believe other parts of the world), they erect literal "shark nets" to fence off the parts of the coast that people frequently swim in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_net
So my point is, we already engage in a terrific amount of ... I kinda wanna call it "shitty terraforming" ... in our coastal areas. Turning a few kilometer stretch of beach into a jacuzzi doesn't sound so bad to me when framed in that context :)
depends on if it pales in comparison to the volcano vent heat output.
It is a great spot. Can be a tough entry when the surf is up. But overall I would say it is certainly among the best spots on Oahu for shore snorkeling. And it is just a 5 minute drive if you are staying at any of the condos or hotels at Ko Olina.
If you are worried water will get cooler, let me tell you about global boiling…
Cynical joke aside, renewable electrical systems also need cooling: heat pumps for AC, but also cooling batteries, solar panels if you want them to perform well, etc. I feel like it’s best if that heat is used in heat pumps to warm up water for showers, but there might be some waste left for Electric Beach.
I've snorkeled at Electric Beach -- underwater you could hear the buzzing from the powerplant. Somewhat surreal and I'm surprised it didn't bother the marine life.
On the flipside, its not as obvious what coal burning exhaust has done to other parts of the biome. I imagine its extremely damaging. Not to mention, what it does to human lungs.
Evolution didn't create all this life with the assumption there would be electric beaches. I suspect the loss of this warmth will be a small price to pay to reduce emissions and that other parts of the biome will flourish in-line with how evolution developed life in that regions for billions of years.
For me it would be less about spooky and more that I don't want to swim anywhere near whatever they are pumping out.
It's clean water. They circulate ocean water through a heat exchanger to cool the steam condenser.
Nuclear plants do the same thing.
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Ostensibly it is just warm water from a cooling system. Like a PC watercooling system, except the reservoir is literally the Pacific Ocean.
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A phobia or just really disconcerting? I guess it just depends.
I've swam with dolphins there. It's really beautiful for how accessible it is as a snorkeling spot
I probably stared at the picture a little too long.
This was a little buried, so surfacing some #s that seemed interesting to put this in perspective:
- 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.
https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
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.
Yup, absolutely. Places with high energy costs due to being geographically isolated / without a lot of local energy resources have always struck me as some of the best initial places for solar+battery.
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Yup exactly! https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-unstoppabl...
Can you clarify your usage of "thermal" here? Most everything except photovoltaic is thermal.
In the US, we usually name the heat source -- coal, natural gas, nuclear -- even though these are all thermal in operation. And the word 'thermal' does not show up in any of those when we talk about them.
The only time the word 'thermal' shows up in US usage is with the 'geo' prefix, and I can't imagine compressing the runtime of a geothermal plant, it's the perfect base-load plant. Are we talking about different things?
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If only the "systems" we were considering were meant to provide limitless and virtually free electricity (nuclear), which is congruence with the "systems" of reducing poverty.
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Don't forget to factor in the thermal generators' owners abandoning their business way before you thought they would, decades before there's a viable replacement for on-demand power to run an advanced industrial economy.
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.
Do we currently have enough renewables installed in (eg) the the UK for batteries to increase capacity factor? Is there ever enough renewable production that energy is lost?
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Hawaii, a remote island in the middle of the pacific, pays less than the 2024 pg&e prices for the bay area. PG&E are the worst.
Oahu's average residential electricity costs $0.43/kWh[0]. My last PG&E bill shows an average cost of $0.35/kWh. Still outrageous considering the national average is less than half that, but I think your numbers are off.
Having said that, PG&E is the worst. Agreed.
[0] https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/billing-and-payment/rates-a...
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And this is before PG&E gets around to all their deferred maintenance on lines that are likely to start deadly wildfires.
One does have to wonder where all the money has gone, and what the supposed regulators at CPUC are allowing to happen.
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In the SF Bay area, electricity prices are so high with PGE, it's more cost effective to burn gasoline in my Gen1 Chevy Volt if the price of gas is below $4.50 a gallon.
I thought it couldn't get worse and then I saw my parents' San Diego electricity bills. It seems like whatever CA is doing/has done is really screwing its residents.
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That doesn't seem right. Looked up the rates for San Mateo and San Francisco county rates[1] and they're both under $0.400/kWh. On the other hand my parents in San Diego are paying over $0.450/kWh with rates scheduled to go even higher in 2024.
[1] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/RateComparison
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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.
Can you explain your logic a bit more? I'm struggling to understand how you calculated the $0.074, and what you are saying it represents.
Edit: I suspect your calculations just represent depreciation over the batteries lifetime, which is only one of the costs involved.
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Typically at the moment we talk about a price of about $15 a MWH for Wind and $14 for Solar (last year anyway). So around $0.15 p/KWH for the power to charge and discharge it. Assuming the wind/solar is only going for a third of the day that brings the average price up to about $.209 p/kwh when we take into account battery wear cost. That is definitely economically viable in a very large number of places in the world.
Incidentally the totals work out about the same on a home solar system, my battery is 0.09 p/kwh and the Solar output averages out to about 0.07p/kwh but get paid for export at 0.15 p/kwh.
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That's close to my guesstimates of about $0.10/kwr. So I tend to believe it.
The important thing is battery storage is competitive with peaking plants over a period of hours. And lowest cost when it comes to short term supplies on the order of seconds to an hour.
Also the logistics of containerized batteries is great. You need a place to put them and a grid connection. And nothing more than that.
Are you assuming zero cost for the power to charge the battery?
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it won’t make any impact on the prices there because it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what they spend importing oil and diesel to burn for the majority of their electricity
rountrip is closer to 85% and you have to add the power electronic, also the graph is cell cost of module/pack/gigapack and security systems...
The windy side of Maui has a bunch of wind turbines.
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.
You mixed up Power and Energy.
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565 MWh = 2 TJ
Fat Man was 88 TJ
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.
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/10/09/netherlands-allocates...
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.
Pumped hydro is really great at scale, and it's a shame we don't build more of it. But it needs at least a substantial hill, with the ability to build a reservoir at the top and at the bottom (ideally just a natural lake at the bottom). The Netherlands is a uniquely bad place for them due to being famously flat.
Hawaii on the other hand could probably do some really effective pumped hydro plants. I wonder why the have so many battery installations instead?
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Funnily enough next to wind also solar is one of the major renewable sources in the Netherlands. So also day-night storage would be important.
The Netherlands actually is second place in terms of solar generation per capita in the world (only Australia has more).
Too bad the source doesn’t say it either. Is that 160-380 MWh of energy storage or 160-380 MW of peak output power?
It’s probably the former.
For 400 million EUR you can buy ~300 Tesla Megapacks 2XL which together give ~300 MW of output power and ~1.2 GWh capacity.
Yup - batteries are also getting fast tracked in the TSO connection queue in NL. Lots of good news for Tesla and other battery manufacturers.
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.
https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/update-rolling-oahu-outages...
That seems unrelated to the batteries, couldn't a storm damage the coal plant?
Yes a storm could damage the coal plant with some small probability. But now you have replaced the coal plant with batteries + solar. Solar will be disabled by every large storm due to cloud cover. The grid will certainly be less reliable.
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The storm didn’t damage the batteries, the storm just caused a needfor the energy larger then what the batteries could do
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More likely that it would affect electricity cables and knock out power in a lot of areas. But that would be true regardless of the power source.
Batteries, like coal plants should be pretty resilient. Wind turbines should be mostly fine as well. The Chinese actually have lots of off shore wind and seasonal typhoons. You can expect some percentage of turbines to need maintenance after that probably. But overall it should be fine. Solar panels basically produce less power with cloud cover. And if they aren't mounted properly there might be some storm damage. But otherwise, that should be fine too. Hail would be a bigger challenge than wind. There were some reports of freakishly large hail stones destroying some solar panels a while back.
Mostly, having a lot of decentralized power generation in the form of wind turbines and solar panels all over the place is a good idea from a resilience point of view.
It doesn’t coincide, as the coal plant shut down in 2022, more than a year before this storm.
Wouldn't it have to have happened after the plant shutdown in order for it to coincide? If it happened prior, then it would have been clearly unrelated. If you shut down a power plant and run into power issues down the road, a connection seems likely.
Oh hey that's why my power went out!
It literally did not coincide at all, given that the coal plant in question closed in September 2022.
>> 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.
> It literally did not coincide at all, given that the coal plant in question closed in September 2022.
You simply don't get it. You're oddly requiring the bad storm happen soon after the plant was closed down for there to be a connection, which is obviously not the case. One can take an action which creates a vulnerability that takes some time to finally cause a problem.
You're saying something as silly as: the removal of the bolts holding in the emergency exit plug did not cause the hole in Alaska Airlines flight 1282, because the door didn't fly off immediately after the bolts were removed.
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If they kept the coal plant operational for when solar is not viable (shocker, I know, we can’t always see the Sun), then it wouldn’t have happened. Any point after September 2022 that they suffer a lack-of-solar-based blackout directly coincides with lacking the reliability of a coal power plant.
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.
I LOVE that site. The Achilles heel of it is that it doesn’t account for transmission costs, but that’s solvable by just picking a single point (ie no geographic diversity or transmission). Overall, it’s the perfect antidote for all the commonly repeated but wrong claims on the Internet (and this goes for everyone).
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This is really interesting but I am not seeing how it gets to end price. It's saying around 54eur/mwh in the UK with the 2020 technology assumption.
I can see that cost for the solar/wind itself but seems very low for the masses of hydrogen (and associated round trip losses) that it's suggesting. I have read some estimates that it could at least double the price?
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I think the assumption you need to use batteries alone for seasonal storage or that you need a pure zero emissions system is missing the point.
A system that has a gas turbine backup for that non-windy week of winter that happens every 5 years is something of substantial value. Use batteries for capital maximizing daily cycles, and leave coal and gas as "storage" for seasonal emergency cycles, this would be a major, major achievement for humanity.
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> 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?
Well in terms of the various capabilities the article highlighted
it sounds like the battery plant is successful. But the article itself says that the plant does not replace the "energy" component of the old coal power plant, which is why I asked the questions I asked. And it is the energy component that is critical for really retiring base load capacity provided by fossil fuel plants at grid level. Without the ability to retire the base load capacity you aren't really solving the problem. Costs rise dramatically (you now have two energy systems) and/or you have to accept less reliability (running out of power when wind/solar/hydro/battery are inadequate).
I think you are mis-interpreting my comment and being unfair in characterizing what I'm saying as "narrow minded" or "grasping at straws".
> The old coal generator provided three key values to Oahu, Keefe explained: energy (the bulk volume of electricity), capacity (the instantaneous delivery of power on command), and grid services (stabilizing functions for the grid, wonky but vital to keeping the lights on).
> The battery directly replaces the latter two: It matches the coal plant’s maximum power output (or “nameplate capacity,” in industry parlance), and it is programmed to deliver the necessary grid services that keep the grid operating in the right parameters.
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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.
It’s about 12 weeks in Germany:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac4dc8
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> 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.
It depends very much on where you live. Famously, California can get to 100% renewable production with 3 hours of storage, because production is very stable, load peaks match production well and there is sufficient natural hydropower resources available.
In contrast, Finland would need about 3 months worth to hit 100% renewable. Because worst load peaks happen when production from both wind and solar can be zero for a prolonged period, and natural hydro output is limited at the same time. 3 months is absolutely not actually feasible, so there will always need to be some baseload from nuclear or fossil sources.
But 2-3 days of storage is still quite a lot. The recently started OL3 power plant had a total construction cost of ~11B€, making it one of the most expensive construction projects ever. It has a nameplate capacity of 1600MWe, assuming 95% capacity factor (it goes up when it's cold and down when it's warm), if you spent it's construction cost building grid-scale batteries, assuming the lowest cost of a completed battery project anywhere in the world, you'd get something like 27 hours of storage. So even if the primary production was free, if you need more than that, you'd be better off building the world's largest and most expensive nuclear power plant instead of batteries + renewables.
> 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.
He was a coauthor on a recent review article on 100% RE energy systems. One conclusion of the review article is that e-fuels are very useful, and that with e-fuels costs are similar to those of energy systems based on fossil fuels.
E-fuels (like hydrogen) inherently provide very long term storage.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
This report, which is often quoted,
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...
gives a crazy low cost for a solar + battery plant that assumes storage for an hour and a half which is certainly too little. When I split out their generation and storage numbers and put in the assumption that 12 hours of storage gets you through the night the price is getting in the same range as gas turbine power plants.
There's the seasonal problem too, the answer to that is some combination of building more solar capacity or adding huge amounts of storage. I'd estimate that the daily insolation varies by a factor of 2 or so in NY
https://www.solarenergylocal.com/states/new-york/new-york/
so you could build maybe twice the solar capacity and have enough generation in the winter. Judged that way the system cost is creeping in the direction of what nuclear energy costs, though you've got a lot of "free" electricity in the summer although that could be "free as in puppy". Hypothetically you could do something like desalinate seawater and pump it uphill into reservoirs but operating any kind of industrial factory intermittently is going to be murder for capital and operating costs. There is this idea
https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/
where you could smooth out diurnal variation in a "hydrogen economy" factory by overbuilding electrolyzers, but to take advantage of "free" summer electricity you might have to lay off all your workers half the year not to mention building surplus transmission infrastructure.
Of course it takes detailed modeling of supply and demand to get good cost estimates for renewable plus storage systems and one thing I find irksome about that EIA report is that it quotes one number for a solar energy plant which is just wrong because the exact same solar plant will product a lot more power in Nevada and it will in Wisconsin. Many people are quoting these numbers and not really aware that they are discrediting themselves and the renewable energy cause because quoting a number that doesn't depend on time and place just violates common sense.
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Here is a study for two areas, Germany and California:
http://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-batteries...
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> 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.
> so you'd need to have something like 10x solar if you wanted the overcapacity strategy to work, which also make things prohibitively expensive.
In the short-term, gas backup for such scenarios (which are relatively rare, and during which renewables will still operate at some non-100% fraction of the required energy) seems like it might be a reasonable option: we could probably get to (pulling numbers out of thin air) 95% renewable generation or something that way.
Longer term, we'll definitely need some kind of long-term storage though. Perhaps synthetic fuel driven by overcapacity renewables during peak generation times might be an option here?
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Germany can do it with a combination of wind, solar, batteries, and hydrogen.
The green hydrogen is crucial, to deal with Dunkelflauten and to some extent seasonality. Germany has ample salt formations for cheap hydrogen storage. At the site I linked elsewhere in these comments, the solution for 24/7 power from RE is nearly doubled in Germany if green hydrogen is omitted.
Germany is suffering now from the decision to pay for the 2009-2012 solar builds using long term high rates. When that ends (2032?) the costs should come down a lot. Building out solar now should be much less expensive.
We don't know if 10x will be prohibitively expensive going forward. It can also enable new kinds of uses of electricity we don't have today, offsetting the cost of build-out.
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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.
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DoE has a development program called “Long Term Storage”. IIRC “long term” is anything more than 12 hours.
Seasonal sounds implausible to my, but it’s not my area and I haven’t worked in storage for over a decade.
Seasonal is possible, but I'd imagine scaling it is tough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community
https://www.planete-energies.com/en/media/article/how-does-l...
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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.
Other regions will need other solutions.
> when it is dark and calm.
When is that in Hawaii?
There is almost always wind in Hawaii.
In late winter/early spring sometimes the trade winds get "funky" and there will be days where there is absolutely no wind at all and it is a little eerie.
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What's the geothermal power potential in Hawaii? Seems like it would be a good source for it to me.
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Not sure about calm (I feel like there's pretty much always some wind), but the rainy season brings lots of clouds. And even outside the rainy season there are days cloudy enough to impact solar generation.
Which is why I asked if the weather conditions changed the calculus in Hawaii. Great for Hawaii, but doesn't help in other locations.
It's Hawaii. They're literally sitting on an infinite energy supply and have almost continuous sun (apart from nights).
>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.
There also is no upper bound on the maximum time, just a lower and lower probability. Like with flooding, there's a recurrence interval.
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
The same is true of other types of energy production... like when France lost 50% of it's nuclear simultaneously...
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20220902-france-to-restar...
Ultimately every technology has some unplanned downtime, and there will always be a risk of too much not generating simultaneously.
The problem is that is non-tropical regions, in winter you get less sun and long periods (3 weeks is routine in European winter) with no winds so you need to be able to supply enough power for a very big amount of time.
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Who paid for these studies? "order of seasons" - that can't be right.
Why do you think that can't be right?
Solar and wind generation themselves are seasonal and don't match the seasonal patterns of demand. So you need to time shift across seasons if you don't have the instantaneous (base load) capacity available all the time.
You might say, well, just build more windmills or solar farms. Doesn't help when it is dark and calm. Your "overbuild" is useless in that situation. So you need storage (or other base load generation, fossil or nuclear).
In this study, it is estimated that Germany and California both need about 25TWh of storage to time shift energy supplied by intermittent sources to other parts of the year. The study claims $5 trillion to purchase batteries to store that much energy.
http://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-batteries...
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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.
Most electrical consumption is on an island two islands over from the volcanoes. Probably also geological: hot springs are not really a thing in Hawaii.
It does seem like it would be possible to lay a cable to transmit the power from the Big Island to Oahu. My reference for that is the plan to lay a cable to transmit power from Australia to Singapore.
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Run an underwater hvdc line like the uk does
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Easy, just move the volcanoes
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The real crux behind geothermal is hot water. Hawaii is arid and the areas where geothermal does occur is on the "Big Island" and are often considered sacred by Native Hawaiians.
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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]?
[1]: http://leapsecond.com/pages/mains/ [2]: http://hummingbirdclock.info/about
It's interesting, I've heard lots of tales about how we need the spinning mass to stabilise the grid in way which apparently solar, for example, doesn't.
It's not immediately obvious to me whether batteries do or don't provide this capability. I know there are some projects where they are introducing giant flywheels with motor generators (and others where mothballed power plants are run at tickover, though I think this might be more for active / reactive power control), are these just an alternative to batteries with much lower tech or is there something intrinsic about a rotating generator which is hard to reproduce?
The inverters attached to solar or batteries can provide frequency support and even reactive power. They just need to have the smarts to do it at the right frequency, and standards for that have come about in recent years. In the early days, there wasn't much need so by KISS standards it would have been the wrong choice to start with grid-forming inverter design.
People who complain about the lack of spinning mass do not have much knowledge about AC power, even if they understand the prior forms of our grid very well. Classic mistake of is vs. ought.
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I work with grid storage battery systems (as a software engineer, so no expert on the physics)
> It's interesting, I've heard lots of tales about how we need the spinning mass to stabilise the grid in way which apparently solar, for example, doesn't.
This is false and a common misconception according to a coworker of mine, having a spinning mass to stabilise the grid is one way of keeping frequency stable, but not the only way. In fact batteries are way better than spinning mass at stabilising frequency. The problem with batteries is that they need a lot of software systems to kick in and kick out of the grid and those can be quite complicated and costly to develop, but once they are in place they will stabilise the grid way better than a giant flywheel.
This is so commonly misunderstood that apparently Australia (where my coworker used to work) had some rules at the central electricity provider agency to enforce certain minimum amounts of spinning mass in the grid. So it seems it can also be a matter of regulations not catching up with technology.
In the article: "The Kapolei project provides a first line of defense, called “synthetic inertia,” responding to and correcting grid deviations in real time."
I thought Hawaii largely ran on diesel?
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.
Thanks, this is what I was looking for:
Shh. Be quiet and drink the Kool-Aid.
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
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
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.
Hi cynical! Overhead is the sun - it is a massively more abundant energy resource than coal could ever be. It has run for billions of years and has at least one more left in it. Coal is a finite resource and not a very pleasant one to mine.
Solar generation is generally quite dispersed instead of few monolithic coal plants.
That's just solar. There is also wind and wave, geo-thermal and many more ways to generate electricity (power). That's diversification and that surely is easier to defend.
I would suggest that relying on one power source is painting yourself into a corner and then drinking the paint.
> I would suggest that relying on one power source is painting yourself into a corner and then drinking the paint.
You’re aware that that is exactly what the GP poster was arguing against, right?
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I'm a big fan of solar and renewables, but at the same time, in the past there have been massive volcanic eruptions that have blocked out the sun for extended periods of time [1]. So in my mind, the post you were responding to makes a very good point.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tambora-1815-volcanic-eruption/
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Technology-wise, isn't it a lot easier to build a coal plant than it is to build PV panels? Obviously this is not a problem right now, but imagine a disaster scenario where a good amount of high-tech industry is non-operational. Or even a geopolitical crisis where we lose access to enough of the raw materials or manufacturing capacity to make the panels.
(Does the US even manufacture PV panels? Or are they mostly -- or even all -- built overseas?)
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Hawaii is located thousands of miles away from the US with no coal deposits.
I suppose this wouldn't be the first time the mainland introduced onerous requirements onto its territories (see: Jones Act)
Gas and oil are also abundant and they are less polluting. Hawaii mostly runs on oil.
https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/clean-energy-hawaii/our-cle...
Yes! And the same for chariot manufactures.
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.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32718968
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.
The article goes into this:
"The old coal generator provided three key values to Oahu, Keefe explained: energy (the bulk volume of electricity), capacity (the instantaneous delivery of power on command), and grid services (stabilizing functions for the grid, wonky but vital to keeping the lights on). The battery directly replaces the latter two: It matches the coal plant’s maximum power output (or “nameplate capacity,” in industry parlance), and it is programmed to deliver the necessary grid services that keep the grid operating in the right parameters."
Energy without batteries must be produced when it's consumed. Imagine your cellphone without a battery: it would be connected to a power plant that must be started on demand, and stopped when your phone is not in use.
Now imagine your phone gets a battery, that can be charged with a small solar panel when you're not using the phone. This way, you can use the phone even when the sun isn't shinning or at dark hours, as long as the solar panel and the sunny hours at least match you consumption.
The additional generation you call for comes from the windy/sunny times when people are not consuming 100% of production, so they charge the batteries instead.
In fact, coal can be thought as a storage of energy, not a source: it was stored from sun energy some million years ago when nobody was consuming it, so we can recover some of that energy today by pluging "the coal batteries" in a furnace.
I’m aware the battery in Hawaii uses additional generation, it’s mentioned in the article. That point was the obviously-misleading headline, which is not the first I’ve seen for this type of installation.
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With the prevalence of cell phones and laptops in our life, accusing somebody of not understanding how a battery works is tantamount to an insult like calling them a man idiot. Who does not have to deal with charging their batteries continuously?
Further, it seems a bit hypocritical to complain about others reacting only to the headline without reading the article, when that's exactly what you have done.
Your assumptions are incorrect, and it’s perfectly valid to point out that a battery is not, in fact, a generator, when there are many headlines such as this one confusing the issue. There are many man idiots, whatever that means, making assumptions.
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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.
1. https://www.higp.hawaii.edu/hggrc/fervo-energy-aims-to-incre...
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?
Sodium Ion is looking promising for a cheaper alternative, with currently lower energy density than LFP (lithium iron phosphate) and NMC (high nickel li ion). BYD is trying to scale sodium ion, but based on analysis (I’m open to other points of view) from The Limiting Factor on YouTube, it won’t be at the same scale as lithium or make a meaningful dent in world battery production in GWh units until the late 2020s or early 2030s.
Thanks. Off-topic I naively assumed from general news that BYD was just in the auto business. Interesting to see all the sectors they are in.
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.
Carbon emission is a poor and (purposefully) misleading idea of pollution. Lithium batteries may produce less carbon emissions over their lifetimes, but mining that lithium and producing the batteries is still incredibly ecologically damaging.[0]
Companies, in particular, adore the carbon-centric pollution angle because it allows them to ignore the physical pollution they cause every day, while profiting off of ESG. Microsoft alone will have caused an estimated 240,000,000 PCs to have been junked.[1]
[0] - https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/the-env... [1] - https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsofts-dra...
My mind goes to the question of what chemical byproducts come out of the manufacture of batteries or PVs. Maybe it’s not CO2, but something else. Maybe it’s easier to deal with. And maybe it’s a good tradeoff, or just in certain quantities, but if so what is that tipping point? I don’t know where to look for this kind of information.
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Not really: batteries and solar need to be replaced more often that coal plant. The current and foreseen material sourcing, production and logistics for solar and batteries rely on a ton of steel which needs… coal! Coal-free steel already exist but is much more expensive, and will very probably remain expensive for a long time.
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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.
The country leading the renewables transition right now is China. Since they’re also the country that (not coincidentally) builds everything, outsourcing goods manufacturing to them seems like an okay bet, for the climate at least. (And yes, I know they’re building coal, but their emissions are still set to peak because they’re building more renewables than industry can consume while paying to idle coal plants.)
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Something I see so much in local politics is that things don't all happen in a nicely coordinated fashion like one might want. Say, building some denser housing with more transit. But people telling you to wait until everything lines up 'just so' most likely want neither. Things happen in fits and starts in the real world.
I find it interesting that places like Iowa, Texas, and Kansas are leading the transition in the US despite none being places anything thinks associated with environmentalism. While states you might expect to care are way behind. Hawaii has had expensive energy all along and was an early installer of wind, but somehow is still way behind.
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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.
I assume the batteries came from China. In 2023 China installed more solar energy capacity than the rest of the world combined.
Unless Hawaii was mining their own coal beforehand, I doubt they're losing anything here.
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?
Steady baseload is not desirable, the energy grid must respond to meet demand, whatever it is.
Batteries are capable of that response, making them far more desirable and valuable than baseload.
Curious what this battery actually is. I'd understood "battery" at that scale to be a dam but this doesn't read that way.
This article has some photos. https://electrek.co/2022/09/28/tesla-megapacks-arrive-hawaii...
Lithium-ion Tesla Megapacks https://www.tesla.com/megapack
And here I thought Hawaii's fossil fuel of choice was oil imports...
Did energy prices go up as a result?
Here's a graph of Hawaii's power prices.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APUS49F72610
Note that graph seems to have no data between 1986 and 2018
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What powers Hawaii at night?
Plenty of oil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Hawaii
Coal was only a small percentage of the energy mix in the last decade.
Can we move on from the tired old "haha idiots forgot about night time" slam on renewable energy yet?
> Can we move on from the tired old "haha idiots forgot about night time" slam on renewable energy yet?
Not likely. Identity politics never goes out of style.
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Well, it’s a bad argument made that way, I agree.
But let’s at least be honest about the necessity to massively overbuild intermittent sources (and expensive storage) to provide reliability when we compare $/MWh.
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> Can we move on from the tired old "haha idiots forgot about night time" slam on renewable energy yet?
maybe if they move to volcano power plants
I mean, you're commenting on a post about a battery which can help to solve this problem (albeit this battery alone probably doesn't entirely solve it).
Do you think batteries stop working at night?
Powered by Tesla MegaPacks. Just insane how much value Musk has brought to the world.
Too bad he's jumped the shark these last couple of years.
How's that economic and efficient?
this is misleading at best, outright disinformation at worst. coal generation accounted for only 7% of hawaii’s electricity. the vast majority, 70%, is diesel and oil generators. just like any other island in the world. once again we demonstrate how worthless utility scale batteries are in the grand scheme of things
> The utility also requested “black-start capability.” If a disaster, like a cyclone or earthquake, knocks out the grid completely, Hawaiian Electric needs a power source to restart it. The Kapolei batteries are programmed to hold some energy in reserve for that purpose. Plus Power located the project near a substation connected to three other power plants so the battery “can be AAA to jump-start those other plants,” Keefe said.
Anyone who has played enough Factorio knows just how important that can be.
Yeeeep. I usually end up creating isolated grids with circuit networks and banks of capacitors to make it so the power production (and fuel production to feed it) can never shut down...
Dyson Sphere Program (an amazing factory builder game, if you haven't tried it) has similar problems -- but no circuit networks. I haven't yet figured out how to make a robust power generation system that doesn't rely on just alerting the operator that something is going wrong...
Yeah, I've recently started another run of Space Ex.
Currently have an isolated grid with some solar/batteries for enough boilers to kick start everything.
As I scale, I'll be using a circuit network to set up a steam battery that'll be able to kick start everything and take the hit on surges of power requirements (looking at you Coronal Mass Ejections).
Getting offtopic but I found Mindustry to be a super fun variation of Factorio due to the more adversarial campaign.
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Hawaii is powered by good old oil. Battery did not replace a power plant. Thanks.
Good god. The comments on this thread are the worst I've seen on hacker news.
So you decided to add your own that contributes nothing of value whatsoever?
Batteries can't replace energy generation, it still needs to be generated to be stored. Though it does give you more control over how you generate the power.
Fossil fuels are often used to generate electricity for batteries, which just moves the problem elsewhere. For example, you may be charging your EV with energy generated by a Coal plant.
Similarly, outsourcing manufacturing often moves pollution from domestic to international. If a country heavily consumes goods imported from somewhere like China, they are part of the cause of those greenhouse gases. The pollution has simply been outsourced
Not trying to make a specific point, but often people only think one level deep about these things.
I would say this argument is only thinking one level deep.
If you charge your EV with a coal plant, is that better or worse than a gas car? (It's better.) Are EVs actually being charged with only coal power? (No.) Do we have the technology to replace polluting power plants? (Yes.) Are renewables cheaper than fossil fuels? (Yes.) Do gas cars have the ability to get more efficient as power generation changes? (No.) Do EVs? (Yes.)
Does manufacturing overseas contribute to global warming? (Of course.) If you factor this in, how do US carbon emissions look? (They're going down, both total and per-capita.)
I see you've drawn conclusions from my post where there weren't any... only facts. I didn't make any statement in opposition to pursuing renewables.
Carry on!
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> but often people only think one level deep about these things.
In my experiences the ones who care about zero-carbon and renewable energy have thought very deeply about these things.
> Fossil fuels are often used to generate electricity for batteries
Yeah, but renewables are already cheaper that fossil fuels in most cases. And charging batteries is one of the most flexible loads for a renewable grid. I don't care if I charge my car on monday or friday.
> For example, you may be charging your EV with energy generated by a Coal plant.
This example is just completely irrelevant by now. Coal is dead.
Even then, it's much better to move the pollution away from where people live, and where you have an opportunity to clean the exhaust gases. (if your country cares about those kinds of things). It's also more CO2-efficient, even when not counting future battery recycling.
> If a country heavily consumes goods imported from somewhere like China, they are part of the cause of those greenhouse gases.
Fair point, but in the context of batteries I'm not too worried. Both USA and EU are now pretty damn serious about on-shoring on near-shoring both material production and battery production.
Also, we now have battery recycling at a commercial scale, which is far more energy and resource efficient.
We WILL have a couple of decades where the green transition will be quite resource and carbon intensive. But as the first big waves of EVs and grid energy batteries start to get recycled that resource use will fall off a cliff.
I made no indication that renewables weren't a desirable goal, or that we shouldn't pursue them. I made no arguments against renewables.
Simply stating facts that are often overlooked. Very often policy focuses on the visible wins while ignoring the "shuffling" of externalities.
If a policy passes that lowers emissions in the USA but increases them in China as a result (due to offshoring or other means), you'll only hear about the first part
Read the article. They explain exactly how batteries can replace (yes, replace) the coal plant. In short: renewables have a hard time matching real-time demand. Clouds come. Wind dies down. What do you do? So in the past they needed that coal plant to add extra generating capacity, when needed. But now, with the batteries, the battery can store the surplus of renewables not instantly needed. Then when clouds come or wind dies done, the energy flow reverses and batteries deliver this surplus, hence smoothing supply.
The article very clearly makes the point that this battery deployment does not replace energy generation.
Right, which is why we have renewables to generate power. The coal plant was there to cover any potential power shortfall on overcast days or unexpected late night power needs.
This is a mostly solved problem, it’s just a matter of building out the infrastructure.
So, they shut down a coal plant to rely on...another coal plant for power generation. How exactly did it 'replace' the last coal plant?
What other coal plant?
What? No. They're replacing it with solar generation.
> With 565 megawatt-hours of storage, the battery can’t directly replace the coal plant’s energy production, but it works with the island’s bustling solar sector to fill that role. “We’re enabling the grid to add more clean renewable energy to the system to replace the energy from the coal plant,” Keefe said.
Given the small area of the islands and the less-than-flat terrain, I'm surprised they went solar. Have hydro turbines been considered?
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This article never speaks to costs, as always with green energy, it's only green because the government funds it. How many years can a coal power plant last? How many years do these batteries last. What are the mineral inputs into these batteries? What are the inputs, costs and "renewable" properties of "green" energy? There are none. The batteries end up in toxic waste dumps. All the solar panels end up in the garage.
Stop chasing vanity and use common sense for utilities. How has this impacted their key metrics like reliability, what happens if there is ash in the air for a month and no solar can be provided? They took a proven, reliable production system and turned it into the latest JavaScript framework. Good luck.
Stop making up non-sense that have zero basis in reality.
The costs are fairly well captured in LCOE of these various sources of electricity. Questions like "How many year it lasts" is especially well captured.
> How many years do these batteries last.
For grid storage? Probably 1-3 decades. They'll have excellent battery management systems, chemistries that are optimized for longevity rather than energy density, they won't be fast charging/discharging, they'll probably never be discharged to 0%, mostly above 20% probably, which is also very gentle for batteries.
My EV battery is on its 8th year now with very little degradation. That's with primitive cooling (air cooling), older battery chemistry and fairly many charge/discharge cycles, including many deep discharges, since the EV battery is tiny (27kwH).
> The batteries end up in toxic waste dumps.
Completely false. Battery recycling is already happening at massive commercial scale, and reaching near 100% recycling. From consumer products like Apple iPhones to car and grid batteries. Car and grid batteries are particularly easy to recycle since you get huge bulk of identical cells.
Think about how insane it is to even consider this a disadvantage for batteries. How insanely many tonnes of coal will a coal power plant have burned in a decade? All that mining is gone forever. With battery materials mining, we'll eventually have enough materials for all the batteries we could ever need.
> All the solar panels end up in the garage.
Solar panels are a bit trickier, but that's also starting to ramp up at a commercial scale.
EU is already well ahead with regulations targeting recycling of these things. And given what's already demonstrated commercially, there's no reason to think 100% efficient recycling won't be the reality in a decade or so.
> what happens if there is ash in the air for a month and no solar can be provided?
Over a whole continent?
In France several of the supposedly reliable nuclear reactors went down at the same time a little while back. Huge amount of power went offline. They got by just fine with the help of their UK and German neighbors.