Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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).
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
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
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.
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.