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Hawaii Planning State-Wide Electric Car Network
MojoKid writes to tell us that Hawaii is planning on implementing a statewide electric car charging network. While the initiative seems to highlight the lower carbon footprint, Hawaii doesn't exactly seem like the ideal candidate for this initiative. One reader pointed out that perhaps a solar or wind power generation initiative might be a little better suited for the island state. "We have tons of wind and sun here that could be harnessed for electricity, but Hawaiian Electric Company has enough control over the government to block most wind and solar projects, and they make more money burning oil and diesel because the PUC lets them pass the fuel costs directly on to the consumer. Gov Lingle is taking all the credit, but if she actually wants to make a difference in oil consumption in the islands she needs to get large scale wind and solar projects pushed through first."
Would that be a...wait for it...wait...ethernet linear BUS topology?
*rimshot*
Thank you, I'll be here all night.
Tip your server and avoid the crab louie like the plague.
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
When I think of Hawaii, I think sunny. So it would make more sense to have a solar power initiative there and put an electric car initiative here in Rock Port where we're 100% wind powered.
Being from Hawaii, and knowing how small Oahu really is.
Get a bike.
You can drive around the circumference of the island in about 2 hours. Enjoy paradise before you're whisked away to college and never get to go back.
They're saying goodbye to the electric car?
Second, it's warm all the time. Cold temperatures are a real battery lifetime and performance killer, and this may become a real problem with electric cars in the mainland 48, since people in Minnesota are going to want electric cars. It's a good idea to deploy the technology in the favorable places, like Hawaii, first.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The infrastructure for electric cars is already in place as the majority of places are already on the electricity grid. All that has to happen is for the cars to be fitted with a plug and be able to charge off of house current (110/220). Then some enterprising person will come up with a 'coin operated' charging unit to be placed at the front of all comercial and public parking spaces. And it is all done.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Gov Lingle is taking all the credit, but if she actually wants to make a difference in oil consumption in the islands she needs to get large scale wind and solar projects pushed through first."
This isn't necessarily true. Solar and (especially) wind generation technologies are developed and being deployed. The barriers in this case are political and secondarily economic, but once those barriers fall (due to cost of fuel, or due to political changes), adoption can be relatively rapid. Deploying large-scale wind is an understood problem.
Electric cars, on the other hand, are likely to require a much longer adoption curve. For one thing, they are private vehicles, subject to private decisionmaking and biases. For another, there still isn't a really good, affordable electric car on the market. Third, they will require a well-established infrastructure before anyone but the early adopters will use them.
So IMO it makes sense for them to focus on electric cars now, and on wind/solar tomorrow, because the leadtime on cars is going to be long. On the other hand, the benefit of moving to renewable electricity will hit the bottom line much faster, so they have an incentive to be working that angle actively too.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
>>because the PUC lets them pass the fuel costs directly on to the consumer.
Of course, that's what businesses do!
Hawaii is a terrible candidate for solar power. Obviously the author has no idea of how many hundreds of acres would have to be blanketed with solar arrays to provide enough electricity to run a fleet of cars. Additionally, studding the crest of every hill with windmills hardly seems like a plan. People come to Hawaii for its beauty. And considering the limited size, it's not like they have the equivalent of a southwest desert to plant these arrays. Operators would have to chop down trees and build them on hillsides.
Of the 'green' alternatives, geothermal seems like a low-impact possibility. Nuclear, too. Small, safe, extremely high output, dependable.
Government would be great, if it weren't for all of the politicians...
http://www.allen-poole.com/
Don't try to solve multiple problems. If electric distribution can be solved, great. But idiots saying "If we can't solve every problem and have a green wonderland NOW then screw it." are just holding back progress. Solving power generation is a totally seperate problem and should be tackled by a different effort.
Specifically, wind and tidal energy are NEVER going to be close to cost effective. If you want to solve generation build nukes. We know how to build them safe, we know how to recycle the fuel and we have enough domestic supply to last a century or so. If we can't move on to fusion or some other super tech by then we deserve a Darwin Award.
Democrat delenda est
...and let me tell you something about planning here. For the last 30 years they've been "planning" a system of rail transport on Oahu, and it simply hasn't come to pass. A lot of development projects here are simply shut down because many of the locals are very adverse to change. Even projects like these that have good environmental impacts at face value will require a ton of development. Behind that development will be an equal amount of litigation just to get the permits.
I'm not one to try and sound negative, but it will never happen in Hawaii outside of Waikiki (a lot of development happens there in order to help boost tourism).
When has wind or solar ever been shown to be an effective, reliable replacement for fossil fuels? We need to develop methods for storing massive quantities of electrical(or thermal in the case of solar-thermal) energy before these power sources could be anything other than a supplemental power source.
Perhaps they could consider a nuke plant instead. Those are actually cheaper than fossil fuels, and they are certainly more reliable than wind or solar.
That's exactly what they are doing. They are using solar energy to power the car charging network.
FTA:
The infrastructure for this network will be powered by Hawaiian Electric Companies, with much of the electricity coming from renewable energy sources, such as "solar, wind, wave and geothermal."
Even the editor didn't RTFA!
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
wave action? I seem to remember that at one time it was all the rage.
--
Karma is like underwear, it gets dirty.
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Energy costs are higher on islands. And in that spirit, islands make an ideal testing place for new energy infrastructure projects, like a fleet of all electric cars. Its a pretty interesting idea, replacing gas stations with battery swap stations. From the NYT (go to bugmenot.com to get around the stupid subscription) article: "We always knew Hawaii would be the perfect model," he said in a telephone interview. "The typical driving plan is low and leisurely, and people are smiling." On this note, what other energy projects would be ideally suited for an island test like this? Personally, I'd like to see a test of a breeder nuclear reactor, a full scale Hydrogen distribution network, a superconducting grid..... And as long as I'm wishing for things I'm not gonna get I want a pony too.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
It's time to forget about individually driven cars & roads as you know them. Cars can still be individually owned, as far as government credit programs allow, but the driving needs to be centrally controlled & the roads need to be specifically designed for autonomous electric cars. Maybe they need inductive charging or 3rd rails embedded in the asphalt.
You get in your car, dial up the destination, & a central computer synchronizes your trip with all the other cars so everyone can complete their trip without stopping. If cars were just invented today, they would all be centrally controlled, electric, & autonomous. Roads would be designed for autonomous cars & recharging.
When I think of Hawaii, I think of Volcanos.
Why in the world would they not investigate Geothermal power as an option? While I would agree, Wind and Solar would also be good, passing up Geothermal when you live on the flank of a volcano seems rather... odd.
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
My favorite thing about visiting Hawaiâi?
The interstate highways!
Tell the moon dogs, tell the March hare
It does not seem to me that electric cars would significantly decrease the carbon footprint as they still use energy created by a carbon producing plant. If that was implemented in conjunction with wind/solar initiatives, I would be impressed. Perhaps going fully electric is a decent first step and reduces output... I don't know how more efficient they would be than a hybrid or gas car.
Perhaps Hawaii, like the Netherlands, would care to wait until after 2011 and see how Israel's electric car initiative works out. It seems promising.
Reply to That ||
OK. I like the idea and concept. Have any of you actually seen the wind farms in person? Have you seen the solar stations in person? Where on Hawaii are you planning to put up 1000 propellers and a sea of black-glass?
I can see the postcards coming out someday from the OLD DAYS when Hawaii used to be a beautiful landscape. It works on the mainland because we got Montana (where I live) and Wyoming. There is so much open land up here, you could power the whole US off the land up here and nobody would even see a single tower from the highway...but in Hawaii?
jsut athnoer menagiensls ltitle psrhae for you to dcoede. Why do we wtsae our tmie dnoig tihs?
what about geothermal? they're sitting on a bunch of volcanoes.
Save a bit of gas driving around the little islands - use a few thousand gallons of jet fuel getting to the little islands.
Charging electric cars is mostly an overnight load. Wind power is mostly an overnight resource. If we had 25% wind power and every car were electric or pluggable hybrid electric, wind would provide enough energy for all the battery charging. Denmark is now at 25% with plans to go to 50%.
Wind is also intermittent and variable, as is solar. Storage is needed between the generation and load to ensure that the right amount of power will be available when needed. Electric car batteries provide suitable storage. Without proper storage, some experts claim that for grid reliability you need as much conventional generation available as you have wind power running. There was an incident in Texas where they lost 1500 megawatts of wind generation in about four hours because a weather front came through and they had to dump interruptable loads and bring up conventional generation to maintain reliability.
Hawaii Electric tried wind power some years ago, and it threw their grid into instability. Older wind generators eat lots of reactive power, and the need to feed their reactive power requirements was what made the Hawaii grid unstable. (Electric power has sine and cosine wave components. Reactive is the sine component. A common related term is power factor.)
Newer technologies can take care of the reactive power issue, but it has to be done carefully. In the late 1980's Tokyo suffered a voltage collapse and blackout because of peculiar circumstances in which they simply ran out of reactive power.
How about wave power?
Please don't tell me that the opening credits for "Hawaii Five-O" were just special effects.
Is Hawaii really just beach-break? It was filmed in Bali!?!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
It is one thing when Digg or someone else scoops Slashdot a day or two early, but Wired wrote about this three months ago.
http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
we have enough domestic supply to last a century or so.
Current global uranium production meets only 58 per cent of demand, with the shortfall made up largely from rapidly shrinking stockpiles.
Since US currently supplies only 5% of the world, for us to become self sufficient will require a huge increase in mining. Have any idea how much the tree huggers fight that?
Also the US known sources of uranium are lower quality, and still net a total of 5 years worth of current worldwide use. The hundred years you quote, is "at the current rate of use", and the worldwide supply. We in the US would still have to import 95% of ours.
We use 1/4 of the worlds energy, and we currently make 20% of our energy from nuclear. If we went 100% nuclear supplied, and only from US reserves, (export none and import none) we would use up every bit of uranium in the US (including the un-mined stuff), that we know of in less than 5 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integral_Fast_Reactor
By the way, we could have had one of these running as early as 1997 if it didn't get derailed by the proliferation bogeyman. (It's pretty ironic, really - there's hardly a worse reactor design to get weapons grade fuel from, and the reactor would have consumed piles of the same waiting to be turned into RNEPs now. By the way, treaties don't mean shit.)
I live on Hawaii island and study the energy issue so i can give some perspective.
First, to dispense with the false choice in the summary: It's not "car charging network" vs. "solar and wind". Of course we need both. Renewables are held back for both political reasons (no carbon penalty, 'avoided cost', slow bureaucracy) and physical reasons (no storage, no renewable baseload except geothermal on this island). There are a _lot_ of important-but-unpopular things the State could do to really make a difference - like tax gasoline and the importation of food - which they will never do because they don't have the guts.
However, we could do every possible thing - give away electric cars, tax the hell out of fossil fuels, put solar and wind and geothermal in every possible place, grow biodiesel crops for liquid fuel, burn biomass for carbon-neutral baseload electricity, wave power, condemn car-dependent suburbs - all of which we should do - and Hawaii would _still_ be a totally unsustainable place. Oil permeates every single bit of our culture, such as our 95% imported food.
Anything short of a mass exodus (not exactly a popular idea) and a return to a semi-agrarian lifestyle (not particular popular either) is not sustainable. Very few people in Hawaii realize it, and of the few educated people, many are in denial or hold out unrealistic optimist for a silver bullet ("fuel from algae will save us!")
For more info, see my biofuel notes
You have a group of islands which are really active volcanos with some habitable land around them, and you're burning oil for energy instead of sucking energy out of the molten rock?
In the Philippines, which has quite a few active volcanos (but far more non-volcano land area), they manage to get 25% of their electricity from geothermal. Given the size of the Hawaiian islands and the amount of geothermal available.... well, why are we even *having* this conversation?
Do you have ESP?
But 89% of the houses in Iceland are heated with geothermal energy (http://iceland.ednet.ns.ca/schedule.htm).
Can't Hawaiians use geothermal energy to at least heat their houses . . . um, in Hawaii . . .
Wait, let me get back to ya on that one . . .
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Hawaii is an island chain. There is a lot of corruption and there are a lot of monopolies. (e.g., power.) The Feds never come close to weeding out the corruption (which helps many of the monopolies)--maybe they should hire a crack team of forensic accountants. Or the A-team.
The nice thing is now you don't need a time machine to do it.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Ummmm .... didn't they solve this issue long ago. While recharging your vehicle at home is fine. If the industry would agree on a standard for the size of the batteries then it should be only a matter of minutes to change/swap batteries at a "recharging station". Most consumer electronics use AA, AAA, C or D cells why not the same solution for electric vehicles ?
I think that much of the sugar cane is no longer produced on Hawaii, and therefore Big Island has a fair amount of unused land.
Hawaii only has 1.2 million people, so the amount of and needed isn't too big. Scaling down from the 92x92 mile area need to supply the whole USA, would necessitate less that 1x1 square mile spot to generate 90% of the states non-car electric needs.
..........FULL STOP.
I've seen some comments that didn't think Hawaii was such a great venue for this, but I think it's perfect.
For an alternative-fuel demo, you need to have infrastructure (ie, fueling stations). In places like California, this results in the governor picking a single stretch of highway which runs the length of half of the state and plopping down hydrogen fueling stations at manageable distances between them. The problem being that, you better not miss your next fuel stop because every station is pretty much "Last Hydrogen for 100 Miles" and you better not need to stray too far off of the anointed highway. On the other hand, some cities are trying to plop charging stations everywhere so that you don't have to *plan* your fueling... but that stops at the city limits.
To really give people a picture of an alternative-fuel future, you need to have fueling/service available as ubiquitously as fossil-fuel stations are today.... and they need to extend as far as anyone might care to go. To keep costs down, you'd need to try a place that geographically limited... where people *can't* go too far away.
An island is perfect for that. And Hawaii, in particular, is even better because it's a vacation hotspot. People will vacation there, drive their electric rental car, get a tan, have lots of sex, come back home and have all of those memories intermixed. So, electric propulsion gets a "cool by association" bump.
So, I just want to be clear... I view this as a great *PR* move for alternative fuels. True, from an engineering point of view, there are better places to do it. True, it's a drop in the bucket compared to our continental consumption. True, we burn an assload of fuel to fly over there. But I see this as more about getting the U.S. to "buy in" more quickly to a future that doesn't involve petroleum. Something like this would finally be a testbed where people could experience electric cars without ever worrying about "Oh crap, where am I going to fuel it?". A possible true glimpse into the future.
A private entity is trying to start up a wind farm on Lanai and sell the electricity back to Oahu.
Holy flying crap, this is EXACTLY the way it should be done. A private party doing this, with their own money, their own risk, and they get rewarded with profit if successful. The taxpayer takes no risk.
Like all things in Hawaii, the project may never happen due to the years of red tape, permitting, bureaucracy, etc. involved. Of course, when government effectively shuts this project down due to red tape, we will hear how the "free market failed us once again." And then, government will come in with a billion dollar half-assed solution that never works and continues to cost money year after year. I love our government.
"but Hawaiian Electric Company has enough control over the government to block most wind and solar projects, and they make more money burning oil and diesel because the PUC lets them pass the fuel costs directly on to the consumer"
Confusion reigns on the part of the story submitter. At best, passing along costs means the PUC would not LOOSE as much as they might from higher oil and gas costs. Passing along costs to consumers just means that consumers are paying for higher fuel rates, not necessarily that the PUC is making more money!!
Now it might be true the PUC is making more money from oil for some reason but that's a damn poor explanation to convince me they are really as much a foe of alternative energy as claimed.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Beside that, a smart charger can watch closely the frequency of the AC source to determine whether the system is under heavy load or not. It can then charge only when demand for electricity is low (i.e. when wind power has picked up) in the night time. This is a phenomenon that isn't normally generated by wind systems, but because they follow the amplitude of the grid closely, and because the grid is probably dominantly powered by other systems, it should still work.
Man, are people in Hawaii retarded? You would focus on wind/solar generation, what? You know how huge and noisy those wind turbines are and how much space they require? Talk about destroying tourism, the one thing Hawaii makes a majority of its income on. In addition, those turbines tear themselves apart regularly spewing tons of metal all over the place when they break down. Solar has much the same problem in addition to being expensive; it is ugly and consumes a lot of space. Another problem with solar is that they have a lot of jungle and ironically they'll end up cutting down trees to generate power from solar, same with the wind power.
The solution for Hawaiians, is geothermal energy. They have giant active volcanoes that bleed regularly, and the vents are very accessible. Another potential energy source for them is kinetic wave power generation from the ocean. However, I think they should put all their money into geothermal because it will produce a much greater amount of energy. Actually, it will produce more than they can even consume.
All this is just 1/2 assed bullshit, getting in the way of the constellation of geosynchronous solar power satellites.
Get back to me when the US finally has some sort of Strategic Energy Plan.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
I asked a friend to see about putting together some covered golf carts and renting them out to people that use the bus system in Dallas. The idea was to have the carts at the major transit centers during work hours so people getting off the bus could finish their commute using the carts. My goal was to get the state to tell me what it would take to make them street legal enough for people to shuttle themselves around, at best a 5 mile radius of the transit centers. They said the carts had to have air bags! I couldn't believe it. For me to set up loaners that could potentially increase mass transit in one of the countries biggest super guzzle lead sled driving states I would have to redesign the carts into full fledged cars. sigh. At least some states give a rats.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
The infrastructure for this network will be powered by Hawaiian Electric Companies, with MUCH of the electricity coming from renewable energy sources, such as "solar, wind, wave and geothermal."
(emphasis added)
So, how much is "much"? 10%? 40%? It didn't say "most", so I'll bet it's under 50%.
My favorite quote doesn't fit into 120 characters. Now no one will like me.
Were you born in Hawaii?
If so, could you please post a [sanitized] scan of your birth certificate?
The load following and frequency regulation take place at the grid control center (a.k.a. "balancing authority"). The information will get to the car via the Smart Grid (the information infrastructure of the grid, to be enhanced and expanded under Title XIII of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007).
Hawaii has extremely high electric rates and almost constant sunshine, it's probably the best candidate on the planet for solar. If I owned a house there I'd put panels on it yesterday. You don't need acres of desert to house solar panels, put 'em on rooftops.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
hawaii says its gonna create an electric car charging network.
the fecking article suggests 'hawaii is more suitable for wind power generation'.
has the world gone mad in the last 2 hours i've been playing wow ?
what relevance does an electric car charging network and wind power generation have, in regard to CHARGING CARS ?
so according to article hawaii should ditch car charging network, and install wind power generation instead. and HOW ARE YOU GONNA CHARGE CARS EASILY ?
what the fudge is going on ?
Read radical news here
F YEAH, Go HAIWII
to make things stay on the surface of the ocean. /sarcasm A more limiting factor would be storing the energy.
After all, each island IS a volcano. Each have active parts and can be tapped. Much cheaper to do that then to put solar or wind all over and have to store it. In addition, they want these to run 24x7 so that at nights the cars can be storing electricity.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Don't forget about making sure no new shipping enterprises can operate in Hawaiian waters either. That way we'll be stuck with only the Major Airlines as our option between islands, or shipping our vehicles and goods on a barge that takes a week over the salt water and costs 8 times as much. I'm talking about the SuperFerry BTW.
Malama
How the hell does a volcanic island chain in the middle of the ocean not capable of making geothermal a primary energy source? Geothermal is simple - you need water and heat and Hawaii has plenty of both.
Just my two cents worth.
This is my sig.
It wouldn't be as much of an overnight load if they build charging stations throughout the island. Adding solar panels to buildings would help with the load increase during the day.
This was mentioned towards the end of the article in Wired ("Driven", August 2008 issue) :
http://www.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09/ff_agassi?currentPage=all
Specifically:
"But there is a natural place to start in the US. The island state, Hawaii, depends on shipped-in oil; a full 14 percent of the state's annual $62 billion gross domestic product goes to oil producers, more than any state in the nation. After Israel announced its Better Place plans in January, Hawaii governor Linda Lingle asked for a meeting.
This spring, Agassi went to Honolulu. The governor ushered him into her grand koa-wood-paneled conference room. She sat at the head of the table, flanked by cabinet members. Agassi showed them how the model worked, how it would roll out, how unstoppable it would be. The governor's people wanted to know why this wasn't just shifting the environmental burden to the electric utility. Agassi said he'd pay a premium to buy energy made only from renewable sources, making it cost-effective for the utility to put in wind farms or solar-powered plantsâ"something Lingle has been pushing for. The tourism and economic development director was impressed, but one thing bothered him: Consumers want choices. "This is Hawaii," he said. "Where are the convertibles?"
At a larger meeting a few weeks later, one of Agassi's lieutenants made the case to dozens of Hawaii's business and political leaders. Like others, Dave Rolf was intrigued. He represents the state's auto dealers, a powerful lobby in the state capitol that's against anything that cuts into car dealer profits. The meeting lasted eight hours, and Rolf left stunned. Not only was this going to happen, he decided, it needed to happen, and Hawaii was the perfect place."
Personally, I think that it is great that they are considering moving to an electric car network, but electricity is EXPENSIVE in Hawaii! You know, Solar and Wind power would help out, but they are still really expensive for starting up. If you really want to see an inexpensive way to generate electricity, take a look at the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii Authority (NELHA) on Big Island. Its a shame that they are not allowed to compete in the utilities market. Hawaii's Electric Company (HECO) has a death grip on their tenants and they definitely have a well oiled monopoly! (No pun intended)