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Tesla's New Solar Energy Station On Kauai Will Power Hawaii At Night (engadget.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: The Kapaia project is a combination 13MW SolarCity solar farm and 53MWh Tesla Powerpack station on the island of Kauai. In partnership with the KIUC (Kauai Island Utility Cooperative) the project will store the sun's energy during the day and release it at night. The station (along with Kauai's other renewable resource solutions including wind and biomass) won't completely keep the island from using fossil fuels but it will temper the need. In addition to using Tesla's station to battle the island's incredibly high electric bills, it's also part of a long-term Hawaii-state plan to be completely powered by renewable energy sources by 2045. Kauai has its own goal of using 70 percent renewable energy by 2030. With this project the island is getting closer to that goal and can now produce 100 percent of the energy it needs during high usage mid days and low loads via renewables during a brief period of time. The island state doesn't have the benefit of a massive grid like the mainland to pull electricity from sources hundreds of miles away. Instead each island has to take care of its own energy solutions. According to Tesla and the KIUC, the 45 acre Kapaia project will reduce the use of fossil fuels by 1.6 million gallons a year. You can view Tesla's Powerpack and solar farm on Kauai here.
Hawaii doesn't get enough sun!
They should just burn dead dinosaurs like Good Americans.
Sadly, they would rather be a foreign country. Notice how they faked Obama's birth certificate.
When I worked at PMRF we would brown out the entire island when we kicked on some of the radars there during certain missile tests.
I have a feeling that Queen 8 would eat Tesla's little batteries for lunch.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Or OTEC
Geothermal is something they have massive resources for. They are living on volcanoes after all.
On OTEC they have the location, it supplies more than just power and they are doing the research
https://www.makai.com/ocean-th...
The Pacific Islands (including Hawaii) don't have fossil fuel supplies, so any power plants that use them require shipping them in on an ongoing basis.
Solar/Wind/Sea-based/Satellite generation is far more expensive up front, but is the only way for these areas to have Electricity that is not dependent on shipping supplies in continually.
As a result, this is the perfect case for such systems, and it's pretty easy for it to be cheaper in even the short to medium term.
The people who are doing this are doing the right thing and looking at the long term, not just the short term. I don't know if this is a business or government making this decision, but it's refreshing to see them looking at the long term the way they are supposed to be doing.
David Lang
BUT, they still need the full complement of diesel generators for those times when the sun doesn't shine enough to keep the batteries charged.
This island is totally isolated and they have depended on diesel generators for a long time. Solar is a great option for them because diesel is a really expensive way to produce electricity. Shipping large quantities of fuel to an island is expensive. Solar is a great way to offset this unusually high cost by burning less fuel and batteries let you offset some of the excess solar power you get in the day time and shift it to other times when you need it. It makes sense to do this.. However...
They will still need a full complement of diesel generators ready to pick up the load for when it is cloudy, and it IS cloudy from time to time there, sometimes for more than a day or more. Also, it will not be economical to go 100% solar because it will cost way to much for the storage capacity necessary to carry the load for the time required to be sure you get to the next sunny day, plus the extra capacity to recharge that storage. So, for those days they have a topical storm churning off the coast, their current diesel plants better be available or the lights will go out.
Of course, if you don't mind going back to the stone age from time to time.... Feel free to depend on solar power for your 24hour needs.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Why doesn't Hawaii use geothermal?
2008 data, from the web, total population is 65,000 people.
I hope they're planning some micro-grid integration as well, last I heard Hawaii's utility (at least one of them) was whining about "too much" residential solar. Distributing some battery packs to various substations to soak up excess production during the day and release it during the night would fix that "issue". Centralized production is definitely part of our future energy but utilities also need to make way for some distributed generation.
Since WHEN is a 'fossil fuel' guaranteed to be a liquid & measured in 'gallons'...I doubt that COAL is measured in gallons, so shouldn't this be some reference to a specific TYPE of 'fossil fuel' acting as an 'equivalent energy measure'? Just saying, maybe I'm being too pedantic today!
They burn fuel oil in Hawaii. Much easier to transport there than coal.
Rather than using expensive li-ion batteries that will need to be replaced, just build more water towers - or artificial reservoirs if you have plenty of water. Take the excess energy generated and pump the water up, then release it through a turbine when your solar farm lacks sun and your wind farm lacks wind.
There are water towers and hydroelectric dams in use today that were built more than a century ago, so for an up-front cost you can have infrastructure that will last a very long time. If you're a fan of nuclear power and want to dismiss this idea, remember the whole purpose of your $10 billion nuclear plant is to heat water - to move a turbine to generate electricity.
> There are hydroelectric dams in use today that were built more than a century ago
Yes, 100 years ago they built hydroelectric dams the places where the geography was such that it makes sense to do so. As you said, we still get some benefit from that. Hoover dam generates 3.5 Twh/year (and flooded 250 square miles).
The good spots are already is use, by and large. There are actually *fewer* good spots now than 100 years ago. The Banqiao hydroelectric dam killed hundreds of thousands of people. It flooded thoudands of square miles and the "tidal wave" demolished everything in a 500 square mile area. The 1956 dam failure at Niagra Falls only killed a few people, a major failure at Niagra now would have perhaps 300,000 casualties. So logically we should be *removing* hydroelectric from places that have become heavily populated rather than adding more.
Another commenter gave you an idea of the scale you'd need for towers to work. In some weird circumstance where you need to power a remote outpost and you want to spend millions of dollars on a demonstration project, sure it *can* be done, to power one building or something. Just not at all feasible on a large scale.
The summary is poorly written too, and misleadingb likely because certain sentences are copy-pasted from an article that uses a certain "trick".
The summary repeatedly makes claims about "all their energy needs", which is false and misleading. The goals have to do with percentages of ELECTRICITY, not energy. Most energy usage isn't electricity; it's gas, diesel, heating oil, etc. If a power plant could provide 100% of a town's electricity, that would be about 25% of their energy. To replace gas and diesel, you'll need four times as much, or what this summary would call "400%".
It is common when hyping solar to switch back and forth between using "energy" to actually mean "energy" and "accidentally" using the word "energy" to mean "electricity". That way you can divide two unrelated numbers to say "foo provides 90% of the energy used by bar". Or example "a cell phone battery has enough energy to run a car for 10 minutes at 60 MPH" (we're just talking about the *electricity* the car uses, not the the gas, wink wink).
They do not need 200GW of power for the less than one and a half million people on those islands - thus there is plenty of acreage without even getting past the urban fringe with solar. Presumably that will not be the only method of electricity generation in those islands as well due to monocultures delivering single points of failure.
The only question here is if the above poster made a mistake of a few orders of magnitude or is deliberately insulting the intelligence of everyone here by suggesting things at such an utterly ridiculous scale. There has been a lot of that latter around here lately, I wonder if it's "social media workers" earning a buck attacking anything that looks as if challenges current energy infrastructure.
For large-capacity battery storage that does not need to move, high-temperature batteries (sodium-sulfur, ZEBRA, etc.) are cheap and their disadvantages (weight, insulation) are less relevant.
> A hydro pumped storage plant is not the same thing as a hydro dam. Facepalm.
Actually that's *exactly* what it is, unless you're planning on powering one building, in low-power mode, for a few hours. (That you can do with a tower - power the emergency lights in a work building overnight when nobody is there). You aren't going to build a trillion-gallon tower, my friend, even if you're Trump and you build everything HUGE.
For the US we'd need roughly 1,000 of them the size of Lake Mead (250 square miles). I'll be quite impressed if you can come up with ONE suitable location, and we'd need a thousand.
There are dam few places left with a couple hundred feet of head. Given our actual geography, you'd flood basically the entire area between the Appalachians and almost to the Rockies by damming Louisiana. The flooded area would include Kansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and part of Texas. Alternatively, if you built a thousand-mile dyke, you could use Utah, Eastern Colorado, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, and half of New Mexico. I may still have some graphics from the modeling if you'd care to see the exact area.
Nah, according to the text of the article it's powering neither the State of Hawaii nor the Island of Hawaii but provide some of the power to Kauai which will reduce its use of oil.
Nate
Might I suggest you read the stories rather than just look at the pictures. One of the stories you linked to points out that a "fact" you stated is wrong by orders of magnitude.
In the stories you linked to, you'll also find the capacities of those reservoirs which consist of a dam all the way around - enough to charge 20 Teslas. Germany has 80 million people. Do you think they're going to build a million or so such reservoirs?
There are definite advantages to other battery chemistries for fixed applications, however a major aspect of bringing these technologies into the mainstream is economies of scale. There is a reason why there are so many "Gigafactories" are being built. Until the dedicated markets for fixed storage applications materialize we may be stuck with whatever battery tech is currently being used at the necessary scale (Lithium Ion, Led Acid, etc).
Its not like they don't have a few active volcanoes around the islands.
>> Might I suggest you read the stories rather than just look at the pictures
> Nope, the point of the stories are precisely the pictures
Well, if you don't care to read even the sources you cite, I don't suppose I can help you. Intentional ignorance is permanent ignorance. They do, however, say that you're wrong by orders of magnitude.
>> Enough to charge 20 Teslas
> how you come to the idiotic idea that one of the reservoirs would only charge 5 Teslas is beyond me.
You're not lying, you *really* hate to read, don't you.
Storage capacity required to charge just ONE car, as an example load: 90Kwh
So the total storage capacity of the entire country could, as example, charge half a million cars and do nothing else - no lights, no cooking, no hot water - in a country with 80 million people. As long as you're happy to share your car 160 other people, and use no other energy for anything else, you've got enough storage.
We may be talking about two different things. Obviously you can pump water into a paper cup, or a swimming pool or whatever. Let's define exactly what we're discussing.
> We are not talking about CAPACITY.
> We are talking about weather or not you need a Hoover Dam like plant design.
Well I said if you want to power a building, you can use any of many designs. If you want to power cities, I said, you're looking at basically a hydroelectric dam type of design. So yes what I said is all about capacity - the capacity to power a city or country, as opposed to a building. Let's get a bit more specific ...
The suggestion was:
>>>> Take the excess energy generated and pump the water up, then release it through a turbine when your solar farm lacks sun
Okay so we're talking about what you need to do when the solar-electric plant isn't getting much sun. Note it doesn't say anything about load, it says "when your solar farm lacks sun". We'd like for solar-electric to supply a significant portion of our energy needs. Perhaps 25% would be good, that would be equal to 100% of our current *electricity* consumption.
Looking at the current weather forecast, Germany will be covered in clouds Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, meaning they'll have minimal solar power power generation for three days. A couple times each year, most or all of Europe is covered by a large storm system for four or five days. So if you're going to be dependent on solar for a significant portion of your daily energy, you're going to need to store enough to power Europe for a two to three days (which will stretch to four or five days because you still get *some* generation despite the cloudy weather).
So that's what *I'm* talking about, what you need in order to make it safe to rely on solar electric as a primary source of energy. You need the capacity to provide millions of people will their energy needs for several cloudy days in a row. You don't get there with 70,000 gallon towers, or 200,000 gallon ponds. To make solar-electric reliably power major cities, you need reservoirs that are hundreds or thousands of square kilometers each, and not just one or two of them, but many, many of them.
The Chinese are already experimenting with giant buildings filled with Lithium-Ion batteries.
When the fire starts I suspect the chemicals released into the air will far exceed the environmental benefits gained. But Elon will continue to the person who has fleeced more money out of governments in the history of mankind, so let's keep worshiping him.
Murphy was an optimist