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Tesla Deploys Over 300 Powerwalls To Give Hawaiian School Kids AC (electrek.co)
Fred Lambert reports via Electrek: As part of a state initiative, Tesla deployed over 300 Powerwalls in schools to cool down hot classrooms in Hawaii. Hawaii has a problem with hot temperatures in public classrooms that is affecting students negatively. The problem was so significant that the Hawaii State Department of Education had to intervene. They put together a $100 million fund, which has already helped cool down 1,190 classrooms to date, with contracts set for more than 1,300 classrooms, according to The Garden Island. In order to roll out the program without significantly increasing energy costs for public schools, they partnered with Tesla to pair Powerwalls with solar power to reduce the impact of running the air conditioners in classrooms across the state. It also resulted in an interesting learning opportunity about renewable energy and energy storage for students.
well that only equals $40k per classroom :) Air conditioners + solar panels + batteries + labour
It's not a typo if you understood the meaning!
School happens primarily during the day. Heat is primarily a problem when the sun is shining brightest. The schools already have an electrical connection to the grid.
Explain again why they needed power-wall batteries for each installation instead of just using the solar power directly when it was needed the most (on hot, sunny days, which generate the most solar power) and relying on a little bit of to/from grid action at other times if necessary?
This sounds an awful lot like a publicity stunt, i.e. kids + batteries + renewable science, now everyone sing kumbaya!!!
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Hawaii has a problem with hot temperatures in public classrooms that is affecting students negatively.
For sure? Have studies been done? Is Hawaii hot? Wow, new info for me!
But seriously, this is the kind of stuff that will keep giving back to Tesla, they may be "giving away" a lot of stuff, but they are actually building the network that will be the foundation for the future and they are getting their foot in the door before GE or some other huge infrastructure company gets a foothold on the technology.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
These Powerwalls just don't add up as truly economic solutions if you're a regular customer buying at Tesla's asking price.
Same problem Tesla has with those solar roof shingles. The estimated cost to cover the average size roof on a home makes them totally non-competitive with regular panels.
I really hope I'll see this change in my lifetime, and even better if it's fairly quickly. But battery technology really hasn't evolved at that fast of a pace. Much of the gains we've seen in how long you can go before needing to recharge a laptop or a phone have more to do with CPUs and other components increasing their efficiency.
Plus, the whole battery making process is REALLY environmentally dirty. The more batteries we use, the more negative environmental impact that production creates -- and right now, companies like Tesla are really trying NOT to address that issue. (It's nice to promise all the "feel good" things about batteries being able to be recycled over and over whenever they wear out, but many, many NEW batteries need to be manufactured to meet the needs for battery powered automobiles and power capture for PV solar. We're FAR from a point where all the batteries we'd ever need already exist can can just be re-used on demand!)
Heat is primarily a problem when the sun is shining brightest.
It's Hawaii, man. It's hot all day. Additionally, buildings function as heat sinks.
School is about seven hours, Hawaii gets 14.5 hrs of near-equatorial sun in June. That's 7.5 hrs of storage, assuming the AC is set back outside of school hours.
Also, power is crazy-expensive in Hawaii which is one of the reasons so many people there do solar.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
They don't have maths classes in Hawaii. They only teach one math.
Heat lags peak solar by several hours. Hawaii's grid can't absorb the excess generated at nonn, and strains to supply the need as consumption ramps up just as solar is starting to fall. Some storage to time shift the produced solar power by a few hours is pretty much mandatory, once solar starts to be a large fraction of the total supply. You also need the storage to smooth out sudden dips likes a storm blowing in. Solar production can drop by 80% in a fraction of an hour. That's not a problem if solar is only a few percent of your energy mix, but it can lead to grid instability if the solar is meeting nearly 100% of the total demand at noon, and the conventional power plant is idling near zero output. Fossil fuel plants take time to ramp up. Battery storage (or other grid scale storage) is mandatory for a stable supply once solar (or solar and wind) become a large percentage of total supply.
There's only 2 reasons for a powerwall:
The grid is unreliable/too remote
The local net energy metering situation sucks
Not since we threw them all out.
14.5 hours of solar during 7.5 hours of school, hard to do without the batteries.
Easier (and cheaper) to do it without the batteries. Just feed excess power into the grid, and draw out to cover peak demand.
I can't see how batteries make any sense at all for this application. The only plausible explanation is that it is all a stupid PR stunt funded by the taxpayers.
The local net energy metering situation sucks
Bingo. This is the situation in Hawaii. Power retails for 42 cents/kwhr, about 4 times the highest mainland rate. Solar is currently about 10 cents/kwhr, and federal subsidies push that even lower. So Helco doesn't want to give up 42 cents to get something worth 10 cents. They no longer allow any new net metering installations.
This is, of course, stupid. But from Helco's point of view it makes sense, since they are in the business of maximizing profit from their monopoly market, not serving the public, and the PUC is bought and paid for.
So Hawaiians get one stupid policy ($100M Powerwalls for daytime use) to counteract another stupid policy (no net metering). This is what happens in a one-party state (there are no Republicans in Hawaii).
Hawaii also has zero geothermal energy, despite some of the best volcanic geology in the world, for equally stupid political and bureaucratic reasons.
yep typical politicians piling one poorly thought out policy on top of another, with Tesla their to cash in on the bad decisions. Not that I blame Tesla for that, if government is stupid enough to give away money you may as well put your hand out.
geez if only Hawaii had some other more efficient and reliable sources of energy like Geo Thermal, shame they are in a region of the world with no such good alternatives,
Why would you care? Unless you've had a lot to say about fossil fuel subsidies totalling $5.3 trillion (more than 6% of the entire planet's GDP), you should probably just relax about a few bucks going to solar power, especially when it keeps getting cheaper and cheaper to install and use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_subsidies
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
They do not get that their work is absolutely critical for the future of a nation. Or rather those that decide the budget and staffing of education departments do not get that and place 2nd and 3rd rate people there and give them too little budget to do the job well in addition. The underlying problem is that politicians cannot see or plan beyond the next election and bad education has an effect that is delayed by 10 years or so and then only ramps up over time. That bad education continues to have a negative effect for something like 50 years and longer if you add indirect effects (teachers being taught badly as children usually teach badly themselves...) is completely beyond the comprehension of political "leaders".
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
TFA isn't clear, but a lot of the state doesn't really have a grid. It would be good to know how many of those walls will wind up in places like Kauai, where they still provide power to buildings by running diesel generators.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Sounds about right. I'm also betting nobody bothered to explore low tech solutions like shade and reflective paint. Where I live it's as hot as Hawaii and schools get by without AC.
If only there were articles describing the other efforts being funded by the $100m. Like "HIDOE’s heat abatement efforts also consist of installing ceiling fans, using nighttime ventilation, painting roofs with heat-reflective coating and extending shade."
School happens primarily during the day.
Yeah, and it's not like the school cafeterias need refrigeration to store food.
relying on a little bit of to/from grid action at other times if necessary?
Because electricity from the grid in Hawaii is devilishly-expensive, over USD $0.40/kWh, and much of it comes from burning diesel fuel that must be imported by huge tanker ships that burn even more fossil-fuels. More than likely it's also designed so that extra electricity generated will be sold back into the grid and offset costs while reducing pollution and fossil-fuel use even further.
It's like the Left hates Musk because Musk is doing all the cool things they thought a huge nanny-state government would do for them while adding insult to injury by doing it better and cheaper than the government could. Nannies don't do cool stuff, they just nanny.
in what is possibly one of the hottest parts of the country?
I take it you've never been to Hawaii. FYI, it's generally very pleasant; tradewinds and all that.
School happens primarily during the day. Heat is primarily a problem when the sun is shining brightest. The schools already have an electrical connection to the grid.
Explain again why they needed power-wall batteries for each installation instead of just using the solar power directly when it was needed the most (on hot, sunny days, which generate the most solar power) and relying on a little bit of to/from grid action at other times if necessary?
This sounds an awful lot like a publicity stunt, i.e. kids + batteries + renewable science, now everyone sing kumbaya!!!
Silly questions but I'll try to answer it in a factual manner. On the Hawaiian archipelago they generate anywhere from 60-75% of their electrical energy (depending on which island you are on) with oil of all things. That and the fact that Hawaii is located in an area where solar panels should be quite efficient should result in there being a a good chance that the energy from the solar installation is considerably cheaper than the mains energy (In 2016, Hawaii actually had the highest electricity prices in the entire USA) so why not maximise the use of every spark of solar energy you can harvest even during periods of low sunlight? ... or should they be maximising the use of oil generated electricity and then sitting around a a big pile of extortionate electrical bills singing jolly songs in praise of the oil companies? If I was a Hawaiian I'd dimension my solar panel installation and battery pack in such a way that I'd never have to tap the grid for a single kilowatt all year round, the next thing I'd do after that would be to buy an electric car.
People don't realize that Hawaii doesn't just have one electric grid. It has one for each island with a low capacity level on each one. The issue now, and how valid depends on how much trust you put into the utility, is that there is so much solar currently connected there are serious issues of grid stability. It was built with generators with slow response times and now you have MW of power that flash on and off with a passing cloud. Someone had to put a surge system in, not sure the schools are the best ones though.
Sorry Mary Poppins would disagree :-)
School happens primarily during the day. Heat is primarily a problem when the sun is shining brightest.
Well, there's your problem right there. Just implement a daylight savings time extreme in Hawaii, shifting the clocks by 12 hours.
Send the little bastards to school at night!
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Iceland is not a good example as it is right on the mid-oceanic ridge where the Atlantic is spreading at the juncture of two plates moving away from each other.
A better mid continental hotspot example would be Yellowstone.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Hawaii is in an awkward situation when it comes to power. They only have a population of 1.5 million, 2/3 of whom live on Oahu. That's borderline too small for a nuclear plant. Because it's a remote island, transport costs dominate the price of fuels, so coal ends up being more expensive than oil. Consequently, most of their electricity is generated by burning fuel oil.
This leads to Hawaii having the highest electricity cost of any state, higher than even Alaska. It's what makes alternatives like wind and solar more popular there - their price is more competitive with fossil fuels.
Because of the high price of electricity, you really have to pick and choose when you're going to use electricity. As others have mentioned, most of the state is actually very comfortable despite the heat. The winds are consistent and it's only certain windward sides of the islands where the humidity is high enough to make it uncomfortable. By the time the air has passed over the mountainous areas, the moisture has been squeezed out making it less humid and more comfortable. So you don't actually need to run air conditioners a lot of the time. It's not like the Indian subcontinent or East Asia, where the humidity is absolutely oppressive during the monsoon season and makes the outdoors feel like a sauna.
The point of the Powerwalls is to allow wind-generated electricity at night to be stored for later use during the day. As has been pointed out, it's mostly a PR stunt since the cost of the Powerwalls would make this non-competitive versus even oil-generated electricity in any real cost comparison. But one hopes it will become cost competitive in the future.