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."

Comments

Solar power would make most sense

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

One problem at a time

[jmorris42]

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.

Re:One problem at a time

[bluefoxlucid]

Treaties say we can't recycle the fuel. After the first use, we can reuse the fuel as the reaction core of a breeder reactor, and draw 19 times more power out. 5% of the power comes from stage 1, 95% comes from stage 2; stage 2, of course, is the complete transition from basic spent to fully weapons-grade uranium and then plutonium.

No, Geothermal

[d3ac0n]

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.

Electric cars match up very well with wind power

[grandpa-geek]

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.

Energy in Hawaii is more complex than that

[VirtualSquid]

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

Re:Energy in Hawaii is more complex than that

[NoKaOi]

You make some good points, HOWEVER, it doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing thing to have a major impact on our economy, and thus our quality of life. For example, many people I know are either scraping change from the couch cushions just to be able to buy food, or have multiple jobs and thus no free time in order to pay the rent. Doing those things you listed above would have a significant positive impact on those people, basically by keeping more dollars here instead of sending our tourism and development dollars immediately back to the mainland, even though we certainly wouldn't be 100% independent.

Now let's talk about that 95% imported food. It sure as heck doesn't have to be that way, but it's part of the same political engine that makes us get >90% of our power from burning petro. For example, here on Maui, HC&S (Hawaii Commercial & Sugar Company) has 37,000 acres of sugarcane. All of the sugar they produce gets shipped off to the mainland or other countries. The water used to irrigate this sugar cane is provided by EMI (East Maui Irrigation), and consumes most of the agricultural water available from East Maui. HC&S does not - I repeat DOES NOT - turn a profit. In fact, recently they have been losing money. So why do they continue to grow sugar with all this land and water, when they could be using it to grow stuff that could be consumed in Hawaii? The answer is Matson. Matson is the shipping company where most of that imported food comes in on. Matson, EMI, and HC&S are all owned by Alexander & Baldwin. So, while HC&S and EMI lose money, Matson makes a huge profit because it forces us to pay to ship our food in. All this in blatant violation of the state constitution, specifically article 11, sections 3 and 7.

Guess who the major campaign contributors are for most of the local and state politicians. Guess who says "how high" when A&B or HECO says "jump."

Now to tie this obscenely long comment back to the original article...the point of car charging network is not to reduce oil consumption or to improve sustainability. Is it a good thing by itself? Yes. Is it a good thing come re-election time? Hell no. Lingle and other politicians will point to it, saying they are doing everything possible to reduce our dependence on the mainland and foreign countries, while the people of Hawaii happily cast their votes as their metaphorical rectums are bleeding from being financially raped.

In /. terms:
1. Use up all the land and water for sugar cane so nothing else can be grown.
2. Block wind and solar projects so all of our energy has to come from imported oil, passing the cost directly to consumers.
3. Force us to important our food on Matson.
4. Promote development, even though everyone who lives here is against it, to use up even more resources, create a larger customer base, and let the mainland based developers make money, a small percentage of which is given back to the politicians in the form of campaign contributions.
5. PROFIT!

Great testbed....

[jemenake]

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.

Re:Question

[Rei]

Oh really? They've never worked? Because here I am in a state with almost 8% of it's power from wind, approaching our share from nuclear (11%-ish). Wind should pass nuclear in the next five years or so up here. Just a couple years ago it was less than half as much as we got from nuclear. Better explain it to my utilities that what they're doing is impossible.

Wind in the great plains is actually cheaper than nuclear per kilowatt hour. It's almost cost-competitive with coal.

Re:Not necessarily

[apoc.famine]

Solar and Wind? Are you friggin kidding me? I would have guessed that geothermal would have been the number one choice for a.....volcanic island chain. I mean, Iceland can give some pretty big pointers on that front.

Still, I agree with your point. Once the car infrastructure is there, it's far easier to add in another method (or three) to produce electricity. Hell, people could even invest in their own private generation of choice, if they wanted.

Re:That is what they're doing

[cayenne8]

And do re-read my original post. I alluded to the fact that I could get excited about a high performance car such as the Tesla, but, my main sadness at loss....would be of an internal combustion engine. So much of the fun of a normal, cruiser type motorcycle IS the rumbling engine, and the exhaust note (fairly loud, but not too obnoxious).

Those things that are a large part of what makes riding a good heavy bike would be lost on an electric version....

I don't see us as a country switching over anytime very soon....so, I'm guessing I'll be able to ride my bike for the rest of my life and enjoy it. But, I also wouldn't mind getting a tesla or something in that ballpark whenever they should be come slightly more consumer-ish...and come down in price about $20K or so...