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Tesla Proposes Microgrids With Solar and Batteries To Power Greek Islands (electrek.co)
Tesla is proposing ways to modernize the electric grid of Greece's many islands in the Mediterranean sea with microgrids and renewable energy to reduce their dependence on fossil fuels. "Several Greek islands are relatively remote and rely heavily on fossil fuels to power their electric grid," notes Electrek. From the report: The Greek Minister of Environment and Energy, Mr. George Stathakis, confirmed last week that they have met with Tesla to discuss the deployment of microgrids in Greek islands. They issued the following statement (translated from Greek via Capital.gr): "[...] The extremely interesting thing that emerged from the meeting is that technological progress has now significantly reduced the cost of energy storage. At the same time, successful competitions for new RES investments in Greece, led to an equally significant reduction in the cost of energy production. As a result, the conversion of the islands to RES, apart from being environmentally useful, is now also economically viable. In this context, cooperation with Tesla can prove to be extremely beneficial, as the American company officials have highlighted, showing strong interest in the initiatives promoted by the Ministry for 'smart' and 'energy' islands."
Tesla has reportedly already suggested a pilot project to demonstrate their microgrid system in the region. The government would like it to be on the island of Limnos. The idea is to install a large solar array and combine it with an energy storage facility to store the excess energy during the day and use it at night when the sun is not shining.
Tesla has reportedly already suggested a pilot project to demonstrate their microgrid system in the region. The government would like it to be on the island of Limnos. The idea is to install a large solar array and combine it with an energy storage facility to store the excess energy during the day and use it at night when the sun is not shining.
Solar is ideal for the Greek islands. They have been building wind-power generators on some (e.g. the Cyclades), however the peak energy usage on islands is exactly when the sun is shining hot. The battery requirements should not be that great, especially compared to other scenarios. ;)
I've had a solar roof on mainland Greece for several years now, which, at 10kW nominal (Renesola Virtus II hybrid) was predicted to produce 12-13 MWh/year due to its suboptimal E/W orientation, but it is generating over 14 MWh every year, and some islands are even more sunny from that mountainous area. For something geek-cool check out the bottom of this page to see how my solar roof "perceived" a partial solar eclipse
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Where is the nuclear only crowd? Have we finally found a scenario where they won't recommend a nuclear option?
Ok troll...the Greek island grids are small so we can build batteries large enough to backup their tiny grids. And that's a great solution. Doing the same things for CA (or the US or anywhere on a continent really) would be an entirely different proposition requiring the drastic increase (several fold) in global production of the raw materials for whatever type of battery you build. Learn to do math and do some research and you will find quite quickly how stupid the solar/wind only proposals for large countries really are. As for Greece, its a great place to build a solar/wind/tidal only battery backed grid and you don't need to strip mine most of Chile and Australia to do it. Now that's you've trolled the nuclear folks for the day, go get your paycheck from the natural gas folks greenie...
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
It doesn’t need to be batteries. You could for example pump water to a higher plane during the day with surplus energy, and use a turbine at night when you let it flow down. I understand that something similar is done occasionally with other energy sources.
You understand very little about power apparently. Pumping water uphill is at best about a 30% energy conversion. Electricity to kinetic energy stored in the form of water at a higher elevation. Then capturing back that kinetic energy back to electricity is about 30-40%. So any power you put into your idea, needs to be sold at ~10x the price to make it break even. And that's before you deal with the cost of building an artificial lake and a dam. Even in the warped energy market of CA, price only varies about 3x each day so its not a viable idea either from a physics or business perspective. All of those problem plus you have to destroy a beautiful mountain valley too. That's why nobody is doing it. Its a terrible idea...
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
You don't have to build all required battery capacity overnight though. And I'd point out that going all nuclear, or at least replacing all fossil fuel plants with nuclear, would require a several fold increase in the supply of nuclear fuel and reprocessing too.
At the moment lithium batteries are getting a lot of investment as they can be used for many different things, but for grid scale we will probably want to use other tech like low temperature sodium sulphur too. At this point it's not really a question of developing the technology, it's already there. It's a question of what is the most economical and what are the incumbents going to do to prevent it devaluing their assets.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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Most of us reading this are probably thinking the same thing - how does someone who's broke pay for some new tech?
Greece isn't broke. That was 8-10 years ago. Greece recorded a budget surplus (0.6% and 0.8% of GDP respectively) in the past two years. That is with all the debt payments included. Without the debt, Greece's primary surplus last year was about 3.2% of GDP. In 2017, it was 4.2%. So yes, they can pay for new stuff, especially since solar panels and batteries on islands don't need to be necessarily paid for directly by the central government.