Comment by ceejayoz
1 year ago
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.
That is not idpol
Sure it is. The side that complains about “identity politics” engages in plenty of it. Being anti-renewable is one of those identity bits - from rolling coal to Trump thinking windmills give you cancer.
See also: “cancel culture”
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.
An honest discussion of that should probably include the ecological and health impacts of coal, and the ongoing dramatic decline in cost to add new solar/wind capacity. It's cheaper even factoring in variable production, and this battery project is part of how you address intermittency.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:3-Learning-curves-fo...
I don't know where that linked dataset is from, but almost every claim I've seen for the LCoE of wind/solar being lower than any fossil fuel source excludes the cost of energy storage. Latest estimates[0] put solar and wind roughly at par with combined-cycle gas plants, but without the cost of addressing intermittency.
Plus, it would be probably unwise to extrapolate the current downward trend in costs for the relatively new technology (meaning early in its marginal cost curve) of utility-scale solar and wind that it would continue to get much cheaper.
The two factors combined would suggest that current energy policy in Hawaii is likely to result in increased costs for the consumer down the line.
[0]: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
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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