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Hawaii is, mostly, a sunny place. Yet on the Big Island, I see very few solar panels on buildings. In fact the only reference I've seen anytime recently was some dude in the houses near the current eruption who said "I got my solar panels and batteries out, phew, saved $4000 of gear". If Hawaii is serious about reducing CO2 emissions, every house should have solar cells and many should have large storage batteries too.

The mostly fossil fuel-generated electricity is expensive (most expensive in the USA) so electric cars are less of a win compared to cost of petroleum fuels than in the rest of the USA. The average Hawaiian is not rich - buying Teslas is not within their budget. If they had solar cells on their buildings then the incremental cost of recharging an electric car would be far less than buying in power.

Honolulu, like every other hot Asian or American city, is power hungry. Yet there, I still see little solar power, either on buildings or nearby on the ground.

Meanwhile, Hawaii may have been created by volcanoes, but in practice the volcanoes have moved on from Oahu. So Honolulu cannot have a nearby geothermal power plant (source: https://www.hawaiianelectric.c...) The geothermal power plant on the Big Island, at Puna, is currently being reclaimed by Pele - lava flows have mostly wrecked it and that's a risk wherever you get near the hottest ground. Very hot ground is near magma, which may well erupt nearby unpredictably. Not great for an expensive capital investment. Not great for anything you are betting to keep the lights on with (Puna only supplied 20% of Big Island power when it was destroyed, if that had been 80% there would be a lot more problems on the island).

Hawaii doesn't have a lot of precipitation and large rivers to dam, unlike Iceland. So we're back to solar and storage.

Hawaiians, where are your solar panels? Your plan is bust without them.

> Really? Because what I read is $44M in a multi trillion dollar energy industry suggests that behind the meter storage is a niche market at best, and a small one.

Yes and no. In the lower 48, it's largely confined to a small number of people living beyond the reach of the power grid, a few eccentrics, and victims of poorly thought out "green" policies. Hawaii, however is a special case being 4000km from any source of hydrocarbon fuels. Residential electricity rates on Oahu are over 25 cents per kw/hr and on the outlying islands are pushing 40 cents. https://www.hawaiianelectric.c...

Seems to me like a great testbed for rooftop solar with on-site storage and similar renewable based technologies.

Then there's California which seems to be determined to test renewables on a large scale. Nice of them to do so assuming that the rest of us are capable of learning from their experience -- good or bad. They may be able to make it work as they have a favorable situation for grid scale solar as well as hydro and a significant percentage (about 25%) of the world's actual up an running grid-scale geothermal generation.

Personally, I think Hawaii might do OK eventually although probably not 100% renewable. There's some stuff -- aircraft, emergency vehicles, etc that probably work best with liquid fuels.

California? Iffy, I think. But I don't live there. And they aren't all gonna die if their experiment founders.

In places with a lot of sun and solar panels like Hawaii, wouldn't there be more power during daylight hours?

It's hard to overstate the amount of power used during the day.
Every office building of any size in Hawaii is likely using A/C, and shutting it down or using far less at night.
Add to that any type of daytime industry, from restaurants to factories, and the hours that people are sleeping just can't even remotely compare.
The peak seems to be around the time everyone gets home from work.
Check out this page from Hawaii's electric company.
See that big dip from around midnight to 6am? Charging time. If there are enough people charging during that time, the yellow base load rises and power becomes cheaper. Power that can be generated at a steady rate is cheaper than power on demand.

In Japan and Hawaii power companies are installing grid scale batteries. {...} Ideal for smoothing renewable sources.

And I might add: easier for such (relatively) smaller islands like Hawaii which can't afford lots hydroelectric dam due to limited amount of mountains (compared to the Alps here around, or compared to Japan)

Did I also mention it's an island chain that gets most of it's power from burning oil ? 72% 14% coal and 4% garbage

Be willing to bet that 4% garbage yields truly funky data points.

http://www.hawaiianelectric.co...

Here is an interesting quote from the first report;

Distributed PV contributes less variability to the grid, but it presents a challenge in high-penetration scenarios (in the absence of a smart grid) because of the inability of the utility to curtail its power production, which results in less flexibility for grid operators.

The study even admits it is incomplete

Although reliability challenges increase with increasing levels of variable
renewable generation, this study found those challenges are manageable from the standpoint of the bulk power system for the scenarios studied with the mitigation approaches recommended. Note that this study did not look at the capital costs for the higher renewable energy scenarios or the mitigation strategies. It also did not assess the integration issues at the distribution level of the power systems.

If you read that paper you will see that there are ways to integrate solar into the grid. The issue is that those methods require modifications and equipment to implement. How much will those changes cost? Who should pay for those changes?

The study even points toward the need for more studies;

The insights from the Hawaii Solar Integration Study form a large body of knowledge for future grid integration studies, and the results can be used to further our understanding of grid integration in other island systems as well as in mainland U.S. systems with high regional solar and wind penetrations.

The second article is about connecting three grids and little if anything about the impact of solar on the grid

The last article is a complaint and does not prove anything.
Here is the entire article;

Maui homeowners and photovoltaic system installers are expressing frustration at requirements that they pay for expensive "interconnection studies" before installing solar panels, with no guarantee that their project will be approved after the study is complete.

There is no reference to how much an interconnection study costs. Here is a better explanation about what an interconnection requirements study (IRS) is and what it is necessary in certain instances. An IRS looks into the local grid capacity to handle the input of electricity from the new installation and whether or not local upgrades would be required to accommodate it. Note that an IRS is only required when there is a lot of solar already on the local grid.

Note that the first two articles deal with much higher level grid issues and not local grids.

Look at the current policy from Hawaiian Electric. Notice that IRS's are only required if DML is >250%. They may be required at lower levels depending on the age and capability of the local grid.

I fail to see how any of this supports the statement that interconnect study requirement is unnecessary,

Sorry but posting a few links to article with the words "Hawaii", "grid" and "integration" is not research.

The problem with Hawaii is a typical american one: the market will solve it. What a laugh!

Isn't the market solving it now? Something like 40% of the roofs there have solar now, and they can't seem to install them fast enough. The electric company is indeed rebelling, but people's response to that have been to start installing battery banks so they can leave the grid completely. The electric company has backed up several times.

Hawaii is a prime example for a natural constellation that could produce its whole energy needs green and at an extremely low cost for the inhabitants.

Probably so. Might have to do why they're installing so many solar panels.

Enough mountains for pumped storage, enough heat in the ground for geo thermal plants, enough sun for PV and for solar thermal anyway and finally wind in abundance ..

Mountains that are tourist attractions and therefore unavailable for pumped storage because the tourist industry is more important than green electricity.
The biggest/most populous island actually isn't a good prospect for geothermal - they're looking at having to drill over 4km to get usable power. They do have a 3Mw plant on a different island though, and at one point was considering running some power cables from it to Oahu.
As I said before, they're at 40% of homes having solar panels and growing. 'Wind in abundance' can actually be a big problem for wind turbines - they need steady wind more than just lots of it. It can also be difficult to erect turbines outside of calm conditions. Anyways, Solar is currently cheaper than ocean-based turbines, and land IS something that's pretty dear to Hawaiians.

When you are on an island with no coal, oil or gas and consumption is so low that you have to use small and inefficeint generators then it doesn't take much of a price drop for solar to be cheaper.

Hawaii does have a coal plant, but they have to ship the coal in, and they are big enough for the generators to be efficient, even though it doesn't leave much slack.

and probably would have imported some geothermal technology from NZ, Iceland or wherever a couple of decades ago.

If it was cheaper I would have expected them to do it just to improve their bottom line. Seems that they have one in Puna. Of course, it also mentions that the largest/most populated island, Oahu, isn't a good candidate for geothermal power. To the point that they're considering stringing a power cable undersea to connect the islands in order to transfer power between them, exploiting Big Island's geothermal plant for Oahu's benefit.

As for Alaska, hell no, save the oil for heating and selling down south. We have coal up here as well, we're currently in the process of trying to restart a coal power plant - it's even a 'clean coal' one that was built with the assistance of federal subsidies for the purpose of research.

Finally, I swear I've had a conversation similar to this before about Hawaii - Sure it's a special case, but that makes it a good candidate to look at for the potential problems the mainland could face if solar installs explode. IE look at where Hawaii is now to see where the southern US could be in 15-20 years.

Most of your sources that just state total losses and don't bother to separate out the evaporative losses

You have no sources for evaporative loss numbers. Look up the efficiencies of electric motors and water turbines. They are nowhere near 100%.

How would you feel about a source for 87% real-world efficiency?

Sorry but your link was broken. The only link I can find that mentions efficiency of pumped storage is this one and it is a summary of all US pumped hydro storage. As far as I can find Hawaii has no pumped storage facilities. All I can find are proposals but no completed projects.
How about an actual efficiency rating from a real US plant.

Overall plant cycle efficiency is today 73%.

Notice that it is in New York State so evaporation would be minimal.
Or this one;

While generating electricity, the pump-generators produce 2,010 million kWh annually but consumes 2,642 million kWh when pumping.

2010/2642 = 76%
Or this one.

It generates about 1 million MWh annually and consumes about 20 percent more in pumping mode.

That would be 80% efficiency.
This one

The plant runs on average at 74–75% efficiency.

This one

The plant generates 737 GWh annually but consumes 1,021 GWh pumping.

That is 72% efficiency.
this one.

On an annual basis, the power station generates 1,420 GWh of electricity and consumes 1,720 GWh in pumping mode.

82.5%
So for real world figure all I can come up with are between 72% and 82.5% with most in the mid 70%. Don't you think that if evaporative losses were a big factor and easily remedied that these installations would not have done it by now?

And as for conversions of dams to pumped storage, the first one that comes up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

Helms Pumped Storage Plant is a power station that uses Helms Creek canyon for off-river water storage. It never was a conventional dam.

You don't know what you are talking about.

Hawaiian Electric is also restarting its long-delayed plan to bring a smart meter to every customer by 2018, he said. In February, HECO picked Silver Spring Networks for a deployment that’s meant to include customer energy management portals, direct load control, volt/VAR optimization, prepayment options, and distributed generation integration, as well as smart meters.

2) with HECO charging $.332 / kWH, they are the MOST expensive electricity in the nation (national average is .12 / kWH). Interestingly, the Solar panals are just a bit more expensive to install in hawaii than on a mainland home. As such, Hawaii has the MOST number of panels installed with more than 12% now having them. The next closest is California with only 2-3%. As such, ALL of hawaii's solar install will have a payback in less than 10 years WITHOUT subsidies, and that is with a net metering of only .218 / kWH.
3) all of the island utilities are being forced to change their systems. Basically, they are all looking for large quantities of storage.
And here and here.

Basically, in less than 5 years, HECO and the rest of Hawaii will lead the nation, if not the world, in having one of the most cleanest electricity going. Also, since flow batteries are now lower costs than nat gas plants, that means that HECO will likely be forced to DROP their prices. I would not be surprised to see them drop all the way below the mainland's average costs.

Hawaiian Electric is also restarting its long-delayed plan to bring a smart meter to every customer by 2018, he said. In February, HECO picked Silver Spring Networks for a deployment that’s meant to include customer energy management portals, direct load control, volt/VAR optimization, prepayment options, and distributed generation integration, as well as smart meters.

2) with HECO charging $.332 / kWH, they are the MOST expensive electricity in the nation (national average is .12 / kWH). Interestingly, the Solar panals are just a bit more expensive to install in hawaii than on a mainland home. As such, Hawaii has the MOST number of panels installed with more than 12% now having them. The next closest is California with only 2-3%. As such, ALL of hawaii's solar install will have a payback in less than 10 years WITHOUT subsidies, and that is with a net metering of only .218 / kWH.
3) all of the island utilities are being forced to change their systems. Basically, they are all looking for large quantities of storage.
And here and here.

Basically, in less than 5 years, HECO and the rest of Hawaii will lead the nation, if not the world, in having one of the most cleanest electricity going. Also, since flow batteries are now lower costs than nat gas plants, that means that HECO will likely be forced to DROP their prices. I would not be surprised to see them drop all the way below the mainland's average costs.

Here's some other images then:
http://www.mpoweruk.com/electr...
California 1999, peak load at 6PM.

http://www.hawaiianelectric.co...
Hawaii, peak load at 7PM. Also shows insolation, which shows the sun has set by 7PM.

There's all kinds of data on the internet showing load profiles, it's just that most of it is in Excel spreadsheets. I'm not in the mood to download them to see what I already know. If you have data that shows otherwise then please share rather than make unsubstantiated claims.

Solar power is a boondoggle. It produces no real power since it requires backups for when the sun does not shine. If we have to build the backups for solar power then why not just run the backups all the time? Given that natural gas is cheaper than solar that is precisely what the utilities are doing.

Even if solar power were free it is still worthless since we do not have the means to store that electricity for a price cheaper than producing it from natural gas, wind, coal, and nuclear. Running power lines to where the sun is shining won't help either since I2R losses would be huge, as would be the cost to build and maintain those lines.

I'm not "green bashing", I just did the math. Solar power is worthless for grid power. If you are off the grid then the math changes but that is not what is being discussed here. The only reason anyone buys solar panels when grid power is available is because the government paid them to. That means the government took my money to give to some wealthy person with a big house so they can buy solar panels, then they take more of my money through more solar power subsidies because they have the solar panels on their roof.

If you think "big oil" is some evil lobby then what about "big solar"? The solar power business model is based on continued government subsidies. Without the government propping them up none of them would be in business. "Big oil" and "big coal" would still be around without government money because they actually produce something useful.

Does "big oil" make a lot of money? Yep, that's because you and I gave it to them. We got energy in return but we still gave them that money without a gun to our head. Does "big solar" make a lot of money? Yep, but they do it with the threat of government force.