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

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.

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.