Comment by mathrawka
1 year ago
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.
Solar isn’t disabled by every storm. You get some power even at maximum cloud cover and storms only last so long.
Further it’s generally offset by increased Wind power and decreased AC usage, and can be further compensated by increased hydroelectric generation.
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Seems like a good case for using wind or wave power which would presumably provide max power during a storm when solar provides less power. Of course, I suppose a bad storm could also damage these forms of energy generation as well.
The storm didn’t damage the batteries, the storm just caused a needfor the energy larger then what the batteries could do
more batteries needed...
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.
OP edited their post after this reply and removed the word ‘coincide’. It’s why multiple replies have it.
The original lack of capacity was caused by two malfunctioning units in a thermal plant. The capacity from this coal plant could only have allowed for one more failed unit.
Weak correlation if any.
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.