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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...
Why doesn't Hawaii use geothermal?
You pretend as if Diesel Storage does not cost money. During a storm ships with Diesel can not get through either hence diesel storage needs to be there to cover not just the days of the storm at 100% but also any shipping delays caused due to a storm . Spending the money on batteries or spending it on Diesel tank farms you are spending it either way. Solar is ideal for Islands which get enough sun. They can combine with Geothermal , tide and wind along with batteries. Wind blows at night too and tides change twice a day so everything combined with batteries should have a very smooth energy production cycle with the batteries smoothing out whatever ups and downs there are.
**Life is too short to be serious**
They burn fuel oil in Hawaii. Much easier to transport there than coal.
I saw Kauai's power generation plant. It's located in Port Allen. They barge diesel to the island to power big motors to turn the generators (I think there are 3 or 4 of them). The plant sends power along the highway all the way to the North End (Princeville). It's quite simple but as you mention, pretty arcane.
Oh no, so they have to leave the existing infrastructure in place and use it way less. That sounds horrible, and is definitely a reason to just continue shipping and burning diesel 24/7/365.
Are you serious with this?
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
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.
I'm not sure that you've got much of a grasp on the idea of what a tropical island is. Even 70% cloud cover during a day of tropical sunlight would probably deliver far more power than the same panels where you are. Plus, monocultures suck - even those diesel generators currently used have other diesel generators to fall back on - maybe it's better for you if you think of the solar as the backup for the diesel since that is vunerable to anything that holds up fuel shipping to the islands no matter how many backups it has.
A bit of Freudian slip there I think - opposing the advance of technology just because "The Party" says Komrades like you should strive against the dread spirit of innovation.
It's really funny, in the 1970s conservatives would have been right behind this sort of thing as a shining example of American greatness - but now you just want to drag everything down only because it looks like it could match the policy of another party.
It's shit like that which is on the trajectory to the stone age.
I saw Kauai's power generation plant. It's located in Port Allen. They barge diesel to the island to power big motors to turn the generators (I think there are 3 or 4 of them). The plant sends power along the highway all the way to the North End (Princeville). It's quite simple but as you mention, pretty arcane.
"arcane". I don't think this word means what you think it does.
You probably meant "archaic".
If the above poster was in California, Nevada, Texas or anywhere south of New York they wouldn't be pushing the argument about sunlight being so weak because they'd know from their own sunburn that it is a stupid line to push. The average is fine. Assuming everywhere is a snowbound place with hardly any light is not, especially when talking about a tropical island.