This was a little buried, so surfacing some #s that seemed interesting to put this in perspective:
- 565 MWh of storage capacity
- 185 MW of instantaneous power delivery capacity
- $219M of financing for the project
Hawaii's residential electricity price is roughly $0.415 per kWh vs a US average of $0.162.
The main problem with replacing a fossil fuel plant with renewable + batteries is finding a battery system that can hold energy over a sufficiently long period of time and has enough capacity to replace solar/wind when it is dark and calm.
In the studies I've seen the time shift required is on the order of seasons and the capacity required is cost prohibitive.
It may be that the weather patterns in Hawaii are sufficiently stable that it makes it possible to remove the companion base load generation capacity. The article seems to hint at the fact that the total capacity of the coal plant was much higher than the storage capacity of the battery system:
With 565 megawatt-hours of storage, the battery can’t directly replace the coal plant’s energy production ...
So it isn't clear how much capacity has been lost in this switch. They may also be other changes in the generation portfolio that aren't discussed in the article.
To get a handle on this, I point people to this fun site https://model.energy which allows you to use historical weather data, various cost assumptions, and optimize for the cheapest combination of wind, solar, batteries, and hydrogen to get steady 24/7 power (which would be a drop-in replacement for a nuclear power plant, essentially.) By disabling the hydrogen you can get a handle on the cost bump for handling the storage with just batteries. In some places, that cost increase would be considerable (for example, Germany); in others, negligible (India).
If you don't like the cost assumptions (they cite sources) you can tweak them and see how the optimum solutions change.
I LOVE that site. The Achilles heel of it is that it doesn’t account for transmission costs, but that’s solvable by just picking a single point (ie no geographic diversity or transmission). Overall, it’s the perfect antidote for all the commonly repeated but wrong claims on the Internet (and this goes for everyone).
It seems to ignore the existence of pumped storage. This is as big or even bigger achilles heel, I think, especially given how common the geography is outside of places like Hawaii and Florida.
The equivalent of Snowy 2 - 350 GWh in lithium ion batteries at current prices would be about $48 billion. The actual cost will be about $13 billion - ~3.7x cheaper.
I like that they use actual historical weather models though. I can't stand op-eds that assume that you wouldn't have a mix of solar and wind and short and long term storage to stabilize power output. It's the first model I've seen that's definitely on the right track.
Snowy 2 loses economically to solar plus batteries.
Note I said solar plus batteries. Many of the ridiculous back of the envelope numbers you see for batteries assume every watt is sacred and must be stored and used.
It's usually cheaper to build more renewables, throw some over generation away and charge batteries for short term balancing when that is actually cheaper.
What you actually care about is electricity delivered and having weeks of storage isn't as valuable when you can rely on the sun rising every day.
Snowy 2 is a particularly bad project:
https://reneweconomy.com.au/snowy-2-much-how-can-a-2-2gw-wat...
but I'd suggest any hydro project where the dam isn't needed for other water based uses e.g. agricultural, is probably going to struggle to justify itself versus more renewables and batteries.
Snowy 2 loses economically to solar plus batteries.
It's 3.7x cheaper with roughly equivalent ability to dispatch power and roughly similar round trip efficiency. I fail to see how that adds up to losing economically.
What you actually care about is electricity delivered and having weeks of storage isn't as valuable
Snowy 2 isn't weeks. It's about ~4 hours. I agree that Australia doesn't need weeks worth of 90%-roundtrip-efficiency storage. About 8-12 hours is enough to achieve a 95% green grid.
Snowy 2 is a particularly bad project:
Your article complains that the price is higher than it was advertised at which is true, but the new higher price "blowout" price tag of $12 billion still pegs it as 3.7x cheaper than batteries. For some reason your article chooses not to make this comparison, although it's keen to emphasize that 12 billion is 4k per family.
The article goes into detail on why the 350GWh figure you used for your calculation is a lie, which is one big part of the answer.
The claimed 350,000MWh of storage has long been disputed by energy experts as not being deliverable:
* The upper reservoir, Tantangara, is rarely full.
* The lower reservoir, Talbingo, even if empty can only fit two-thirds of Tantangara’s water.
* Talbingo is normally kept as full as possible as it also serves as the upper reservoir for the Tumut 3 pumped hydro station (1,800 MW).
* Refilling Tantangara will take a couple of months due both to limited periods when pumping energy is cheap enough and to the limited inflow into Talbingo from Eucumbene Dam.
An article suggseting it can provide less than half, which already puts it nearly on par with just purely batteries:
https://theconversation.com/snowy-2-0-will-not-produce-nearl...
But you seem to have missed my main point that comparing the price of storing energy over longer than a day is silly if you can instead spend some of the money on solar power which can deliver power on a predictable schedule and reduce the need for storage.
The article goes into detail on why the 350GWh figure you used for your calculation is a lie
Their claims don't make a lot of sense though.
The upper reservoir, Tantangara, is rarely full.
So... it's a battery that doesn't get filled up. Cool I guess we need to produce more power so we can utilize it better? No. They want it shut down.
The lower reservoir, Talbingo, even if empty can only fit two-thirds of Tantangara’s water.
And? It's simple physics - you push water uphill that stores power. Push it uphill again and you store even more power.
Refilling Tantangara will take a couple of months due both to limited periods when pumping energy is cheap enough
"Oh no, we haven't built enough solar and wind yet to match the storage capacity of this enormous battery. Let's just stop building it!" wtf?
An article suggseting it can provide less than half, which already puts it nearly on par with just purely batteries: https://theconversation.com/snowy-2-0-will-not-produce-nearl...
This article looks even more like bitterness from the competition and they seem similarly COMPLETELY INCAPABLE of comparing what they call a "blowout cost" to the cost of batteries. Probably because 3.7x still blows chemical batteries out of the water and they're acutely aware of that fact being inconvenient.
But you seem to have missed my main point that comparing the price of storing energy over longer than a day is silly if you can instead spend some of the money on solar power which can deliver power on a predictable schedule
You seem to be saying that storage can be done away with. It can not.
You seem to be saying that storage can be done away with. It can not.
You're putting a lot of effort into missing my point.
Hydro IS renewable. If you need an example of hydroelectricity done right, take a look at e.g. Switzerland.
This is really interesting but I am not seeing how it gets to end price. It's saying around 54eur/mwh in the UK with the 2020 technology assumption.
I can see that cost for the solar/wind itself but seems very low for the masses of hydrogen (and associated round trip losses) that it's suggesting. I have read some estimates that it could at least double the price?
If there is otherwise curtailed wind/solar, the RTE doesn't matter very much, since the energy is otherwise thrown away.
I know, but the model above suggests massively overbuilding solar and wind to convert it to hydrogen for storage. That overbuild isn't "free" and I can't see how you can get to €50eur/MWh at the moment for baseload esque power.
The overbuild isn't free, but it's serving two complementary purposes: allowing direct solar/wind to supply enough power even when sun/wind are lower, and to allow production of hydrogen when there's too much power. You get two benefits at a cost that is less than the sum of the cost of doing them independently. The optimization reflects the benefit of this synergy.
The overbuild isn't free but the cost of (renewable) generation is so cheap compared to storage that it's most often cheaper to just build too much.
I think the assumption you need to use batteries alone for seasonal storage or that you need a pure zero emissions system is missing the point.
A system that has a gas turbine backup for that non-windy week of winter that happens every 5 years is something of substantial value. Use batteries for capital maximizing daily cycles, and leave coal and gas as "storage" for seasonal emergency cycles, this would be a major, major achievement for humanity.
A general principle of backup systems: if you didn't test it this month, it's broken.
You wouldn't have such a capacity mothballed and forgotten for years, it would have to be maintained and tested regularly. There's a concept in energy market design that helps finance such standby operation called a "capacity market". The plant would sell emergency capacity and get paid for not emitting, just staying available. Failure to respond to an emergency cycle would presumably carry hefty contractual penalties, erasing all the previous revenue.
So this makes the battery and the gas plant compete in the market place, each with it's own economic strengths. The gas plant won't handle daily cycles since the emissions cost would kill it, but it can provide emergency power at a rate and for a duration that would make batteries monstrously capital expensive.
By slowly sliding up the emissions pricing, you will tradeoff the long term emissions versus the energy cost, and let the market efficiently allocate the resources until net zero, or near zero, becomes economically attainable.
And eventually, when the CO2 charge gets high enough, you transition those turbines to burning some e-fuel (or maybe biofuel) rather than fossil fuels.
when it is dark and calm.
When is that in Hawaii?
What's the geothermal power potential in Hawaii? Seems like it would be a good source for it to me.
The only island with active geothermal activity is an island without many people (compared to Oahu).
But to use geothermal power one does not need pre-existent geothermal activity, at least in principle. If the magma is close, you can get to a hot are by drilling, and then pump the cold water in and get the hot steam out.
Now, I don't know how difficult and expensive it is in practice. But as a "baseload" geothermal looks very good. Does not depend on weather at al...
One could install transmission lines between the islands if Hawaii's politics wasn't so broken.
Equally important: how much would said geothermal cost?
The Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Plant, which is the largest geothermal power plant in Iceland cost approximately €380 million to build.
However a smaller geothermal plant such as the Svartsengi Geothermal Power Plant cost only around €100 million to build
We'll see if it survives, since there's a large magma intrusion occurring just about under it. The recent eruption there (east of the plant) fortunately flowed away, and they've built a berm to deflect nearer eruptions, but an eruption directly under the plant, inside the berm, would destroy it.
There is almost always wind in Hawaii.
In late winter/early spring sometimes the trade winds get "funky" and there will be days where there is absolutely no wind at all and it is a little eerie.
Problem is much easier to solve if you accept that some people won't get any power when it is dark and calm. How many days of no power would people accept?
I'm reminded of the arguments AT&T made pre-breakup, that customers wouldn't stand for anything less than five-nines reliability, therefore they should keep their gold-plated monopoly.
As it turns out, customers are quite willing to trade reliability of a service vs. lower costs.
It's been years since I lived on Oahu but the trade winds have been active on fewer and fewer days thanks to climate change. IIRC they used to be active something like 320+ days a year but now it's more like the upper 200s.
Not sure about calm (I feel like there's pretty much always some wind), but the rainy season brings lots of clouds. And even outside the rainy season there are days cloudy enough to impact solar generation.
Which is why I asked if the weather conditions changed the calculus in Hawaii. Great for Hawaii, but doesn't help in other locations.
DoE has a development program called “Long Term Storage”. IIRC “long term” is anything more than 12 hours.
Seasonal sounds implausible to my, but it’s not my area and I haven’t worked in storage for over a decade.
Seasonal is possible, but I'd imagine scaling it is tough.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drake_Landing_Solar_Community
https://www.planete-energies.com/en/media/article/how-does-l...
My problem with seasonal isn't the duration itself (though that's a challenge too). But if you're trying to shift seasonally you need not just storage duration but volume-duration too.
That is, let's hypothesize a house uses 24 kWh per day, roughly the magnitude in California, 365 days/year (AC in summer, heating in winter). Power is from solar and wind.
If you look at "duck curve" demand, you need a bit extra in the afternoon / early evening when there is higher A/C demand -- you can scavenge a bit more power in the morning (say 5 AM to noon) and discharge it in the afternoon (when the solar flux is high BTW), then do the same trick tomorrow. Call it 5 kWh. That's all the storage you need: a relatively small amount for a few hours.
Could you hold that 5 kWh for four months? Maybe. Maybe you need to store 7 kWh to get 5 out four months later. Only it's not just 5 kWh for four months: that's 120 days of needing your storage, to produce 600 kWh...on a battery you then don't use much until next season.
And that's just for one house. I don't see how seasonal long term storage works, except in a few weird corner cases. Maybe you store it as something else than protons, like methanol. But if you can build a better grid I suspect it's still better to export power from the Mojave to Bangor and the Mahgreb to Helsinki.
I am glad someone is thinking about this though!
Residential in general indeed isn't much of a concern. That can - even in Germany - be done by solar, wind, battery backups and geothermal.
The more pressing problem is industry, which makes up about 44% of our electricity. Some processes, e.g. metal and glass smelters, absolutely require years of uninterrupted power supply or need dozens of millions of euros and months of downtime to get repaired. Some, like electric-arc aluminium smelters, can handle a short-term load disconnect and receive a premium on their electricity prices for that. The utter majority however could in theory be suspended and resumed at will, adjusting to market prices and stability requirements... but the owners don't like that uncertainty and workers don't like it either because they wouldn't get paid.
Other large consumers like city lighting or advertising could in theory also be shut down or reduced during peak demand times. But as we've seen in the winter following the Russian invasion of Ukraine where that was outright banned by an emergency decree, this is politically untenable - people have grown so accustomed to the luxurious energy waste that they're (literally) willing to kill over it.
It's very interesting. I wonder what exactly was banned that winter?
Quite a bunch of stuff, the full law is here: https://www.buzer.de/EnSikuMaV.htm
Most important, no keeping open of store doors that blast people with warm air, no illuminated advertising of any kind between 2200-0600, no exterior lighting on buildings and structures that was not safety-critical (i.e. escape paths, flight safety), temperature control limitations for non-residential buildings, and swimming pools were shut down completely.
Thanks!
That is, let's hypothesize a house uses 24 kWh per day
We're at approximately half that and it still isn't a tractable problem just for a single day, for the 1st week of January we used 88 Kwh and made 18.7 Kwh in solar, about 7.5 of which went to the grid (so would have been available to charge a battery). We'd need 4 times as much solar to get through the days and even then there would be days when there wouldn't be enough to go around. Making that work for a week would require 70 KWh of storage and a nameplate installed solar capacity of about 60 Kw, well into fantasy territory, it would never make sense from an economics perspective to set that up. You're looking at 150 to 200 panels depending on type, massive power infrastructure (your normal hookup will not even be close to enough for this) and a formidable array of batteries for storage.
It won't happen locally for that reason, much as I would like to. The only thing we can do is to try to conserve even further but we're already close to what you can do with four people in one house, approximately 3 KWh / person / day, especially in the winter. Transporting that power from the excess in the summer would be an even more impressive feat. We still have 11 months of netmetering and then that's over.
I don’t think any meaningful storage makes sense for a home, but for a grid-attached solar plant. The surface area is large but I think the cap ex (and naturally the op ex) are naturally much lower.
Even if the solar plant doesn’t generate enough in the middle of summer when demand is high, its grid connection means the batteries could be charging from surplus wind at night.
Not that this addresses my time-volume issue, just saying it’s not worth considering from the single home perspective except in unusual cases.
I'm hoping for HVDC both across both large spans of longitude and lattitude, that would be a game changer. There is plentiful solar, all we need to do is to be able to transport it across the planet to wherever the sun currently isn't shining.
'A mere matter of engineering'. But we do have that capability.
I think seasonal underground thermal storage is most interesting for somewhere like a remote community up near the Arctic Circle; away from grids, high seasonal variability in generation, etc. I don't think it's ever gonna be how you, say, run the whole European grid; there, a large geographic range of interconnected grid is more likely to be the answer. Cloudy in Germany? Spain's fine.
Thermal storage is hamburger, hard to re-use, hard to transport. You need electrons.
Do you have any links to those studies? Because the ones I've seen indicate the exact opposite. You only need 2-3 days of storage or so at most.
Tony Seba has some presentations on this topic. His argument is that renewables is getting so cheap that you can build so much that the minimum production covers all days with few exceptions. I guess that might assume some reasonable grid upgrades as well.
Marc Z Jacobsen has some fairly detailed studies for going 100% renewables. He doesn't generally assume any improvements in technology, so his estimates are conservative. I don't remember seeing anything about seasonal storage.
You may ask about colder regions. Seems like the solution there will be 1. Trash burning (getting common in Scandinavia.. you could even do it with CO2 capture as a power plant in Oslo, Norway is developing), with district heating 2. Geothermal for district heating 3. Nuclear for a bit of extra baseload (UK, Sweden and Finland are all building nuclear)
Also keep in mind that to go zero-carbon, we need to make a hell of a lot of hydrogen, ammonia, e-fuels, biofuel/oil/coal (I just read news about a Danish company starting commercial operation of a giant microwave reactor that can efficiently make bio-oil/coal from sewer sludge).
All these solutions will imply a lot of storage capacity. If you're making enormous quantities of hydrogen you're going to have buffers at both the production and consumption side. Production can probably be throttled if needed.
I'm guessing that the hydrogen power plants we already have will also be kept around to serve as backup. There's some pretty serious talk about switching the natural gas pipelines from Norway to Europe from gas to hydrogen. First making hydrogen with carbon capture and storage, then green hydrogen made with off-shore wind.
And off-shore wind is another thing that's getting more common. If you build really big off-shore wind turbines the production is very reliable.
Here is a study for two areas, Germany and California:
http://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-batteries...
The "trick" here (sadly common in this debate) is the paper assumes you're never allowed to overbuild the solar/wind generation capacity. You can only time-shift, even when oversupply would actually be cheaper.
The most economical solution uses a mix of both, but they quietly discard the best approach to reach the (preordained?) conclusion that batteries are "ruinously expensive." Bad form.
To stabilize the grid you don't buy batteries that cycle just once per year. There's a better way.
It's not a "trick" just an acknowledgment that overbuilding wind/solar generation capacity does nothing but waste money and fail to significantly improve outcomes.
You're utterly wrong there. The optimum, cost minimizing solution can involved overprovisioning of renewables.
Indeed, we already see this internally in PV installations. It's best to overprovision the modules beyond what the inverters can handle and just clip some of their output at times of peak insolation. That's because inverters that could handle the peak would hardly ever operate at top power and could be downsized without losing much overall output.
I'm willing to accept I'm missing something, but overbuilding is not a sufficient approach because you still need to have generation available at night when there is no wind. Doesn't matter how much you overbuild solar and wind you can't overcome the problem of no sun and no wind.
That study isn't hiding anything, it is an attempt to estimate how much storage is required. If you adjust the solar/wind capacity (i.e. overbuild), you'll reduce the storage requirements but there are diminishing returns resulting in very expensive systems long before your solved the storage problem.
If we had grid-scale storage that was economical, it should be very easy to build a production system to demonstrate that capability. I've not seen any examples. And it certainly seems wise to actually build a system that demonstrates the viability of grid-scale storage before decommissioning base load generating capacity.
It’s about 12 weeks in Germany:
It also depends how much one overbuilds the supply, since the batteries need to be fully charged at the beginning of that 12 week drought.
Based on a quick reading it seems they are assuming the average supply is 130% of the average load over the year.
That 12 weeks almost certainly doesn't refer to what you think it refers to.
It appears to be a somewhat arbitrary notion of how long would it take the full storage to be completely depleted, if it was being partly offset by continuing renewable generation over that time.
This accounts for the most initially bizarre claim of the paper, that introducing bioenergy into the system (i.e. storage of natural gas from non-fossil sources) would increase this 12 week period to a full year:
Interestingly, the decrease in renewable overcapacity in parallel to the increase in overall storage volume means that the period when storage is fully used, that is, the period that defines storage requirements, is prolonged to more than 1 year (10 October 1995 to 3 February 1997).
But obviously a longer period is actually better by this weird metric.
They give some more reasonable numbers of 12 days of energy storage elsewhere, which corresponds with figures given in models like this one, which suggest 13 days of power-to-X fuel would be a low cost optimum for Germany:
https://www.wartsila.com/energy/towards-100-renewable-energy...
i.e. the stored gas would if burned and used exclusively for electricity production would last 13 days as it equals 4% of the total electricity production. Of course, it wouldn't be used in that manner, but in concert with other energy sources, leading to the inflated number you quote from the paper.
And of course, an electricity system that burned 4% fossil gas would hardly be the end of the world. I personally would rather see nations do that and pay a carbon fee to let poorer nations achieve their low hanging goals than obsess about the last 4% in an unhealthy and (often seemingly intentionally) conuterproductive manner.
This report, which is often quoted,
https://www.eia.gov/analysis/studies/powerplants/capitalcost...
gives a crazy low cost for a solar + battery plant that assumes storage for an hour and a half which is certainly too little. When I split out their generation and storage numbers and put in the assumption that 12 hours of storage gets you through the night the price is getting in the same range as gas turbine power plants.
There's the seasonal problem too, the answer to that is some combination of building more solar capacity or adding huge amounts of storage. I'd estimate that the daily insolation varies by a factor of 2 or so in NY
https://www.solarenergylocal.com/states/new-york/new-york/
so you could build maybe twice the solar capacity and have enough generation in the winter. Judged that way the system cost is creeping in the direction of what nuclear energy costs, though you've got a lot of "free" electricity in the summer although that could be "free as in puppy". Hypothetically you could do something like desalinate seawater and pump it uphill into reservoirs but operating any kind of industrial factory intermittently is going to be murder for capital and operating costs. There is this idea
https://www.moderndescartes.com/essays/factobattery/
where you could smooth out diurnal variation in a "hydrogen economy" factory by overbuilding electrolyzers, but to take advantage of "free" summer electricity you might have to lay off all your workers half the year not to mention building surplus transmission infrastructure.
Of course it takes detailed modeling of supply and demand to get good cost estimates for renewable plus storage systems and one thing I find irksome about that EIA report is that it quotes one number for a solar energy plant which is just wrong because the exact same solar plant will product a lot more power in Nevada and it will in Wisconsin. Many people are quoting these numbers and not really aware that they are discrediting themselves and the renewable energy cause because quoting a number that doesn't depend on time and place just violates common sense.
to take advantage of "free" summer electricity you might have to lay off all your workers half the year not to mention building surplus transmission infrastructure.
Great comment.
Whichever industry you choose as a Factobattery, you should expect some added costs due to seasonal intermittency. The question is: which industry has the lowest added cost per kWh?
Has there ever been a study to rank order which industrial processes make the best Factobatteries?
Marc Z Jacobsen has some fairly detailed studies for going 100% renewables. He doesn't generally assume any improvements in technology, so his estimates are conservative. I don't remember seeing anything about seasonal storage.
He was a coauthor on a recent review article on 100% RE energy systems. One conclusion of the review article is that e-fuels are very useful, and that with e-fuels costs are similar to those of energy systems based on fossil fuels.
E-fuels (like hydrogen) inherently provide very long term storage.
In the studies I've seen the time shift required is on the order of seasons and the capacity required is cost prohibitive.
Another option is too build some kind of overcapacity with the renewable so that you can avoid using the battery and recharge it even when the whether is not optimal. It doesn't work if the weather isn't stable enough[1], but for Hawaii I would be too surprised if it was viable.
[1]: that's why solar + wind in northern Europe is a dead end like what we're seeing with Germany: in winter here we have very little sun and weeks long periods with practically no wind, so you'd need to have something like 10x solar if you wanted the overcapacity strategy to work, which also make things prohibitively expensive.
so you'd need to have something like 10x solar if you wanted the overcapacity strategy to work, which also make things prohibitively expensive.
In the short-term, gas backup for such scenarios (which are relatively rare, and during which renewables will still operate at some non-100% fraction of the required energy) seems like it might be a reasonable option: we could probably get to (pulling numbers out of thin air) 95% renewable generation or something that way.
Longer term, we'll definitely need some kind of long-term storage though. Perhaps synthetic fuel driven by overcapacity renewables during peak generation times might be an option here?
gas backup for such scenarios (which are relatively rare, and during which renewables will still operate at some non-100% fraction of the required energy)
Now you have built two energy systems and one of them has to be on standby and ready to be used only rarely. Cross your fingers and hope everything still works. You also have to maintain long term storage of gas, staff that knows how everything operates, etc.
Now you have built two energy systems and one of them has to be on standby and ready to be used only rarely. Cross your fingers and hope everything still works. You also have to maintain long term storage of gas, staff that knows how everything operates, etc.
Well yes, except that the backup system happens to be already built. There's definitely a maintenance cost associated with this, and long-term (beyond the lifetime of existing stations) this wouldn't make any sense. But in the short-term the costs associated with this are relatively low.
It seems disingenuous to talk about "short-term" costs when we are talking about grid-scale energy systems. It is the long-term costs that are important when evaluating capital intensive systems.
we could probably get to (pulling numbers out of thin air) 95% renewable generation or something that way.
No, and it's the problem with pulling numbers out of thin air.
I wrote on that topic a few years ago with a simulation being done on real data from RTE (French electricity transport network) if you're interested[1] you can even play with the LibreOffice spreadsheet[2] by yourself if you like. (Caveat: everything is in French).
And keep in mind that France is actually favored compared to many other countries when it comes to wind stability because it has three wind regions with different dynamics (even though they aren't entirely independent either).
[1]: https://bourrasque.info/articles/20180116-moulins-%C3%A0-ven...
[2]: https://bourrasque.info/images/20180116-moulins-%C3%A0-vent/...
Germany can do it with a combination of wind, solar, batteries, and hydrogen.
The green hydrogen is crucial, to deal with Dunkelflauten and to some extent seasonality. Germany has ample salt formations for cheap hydrogen storage. At the site I linked elsewhere in these comments, the solution for 24/7 power from RE is nearly doubled in Germany if green hydrogen is omitted.
Germany is suffering now from the decision to pay for the 2009-2012 solar builds using long term high rates. When that ends (2032?) the costs should come down a lot. Building out solar now should be much less expensive.
We don't know if 10x will be prohibitively expensive going forward. It can also enable new kinds of uses of electricity we don't have today, offsetting the cost of build-out.
There also is no upper bound on the maximum time, just a lower and lower probability. Like with flooding, there's a recurrence interval.
An hour long blackout may happen once a week.
A day long blackout may happen once a year.
A week long blackout may happen once a decade.
(Numbers have been made up to illustrate the point.)
The problem is that is non-tropical regions, in winter you get less sun and long periods (3 weeks is routine in European winter) with no winds so you need to be able to supply enough power for a very big amount of time.
There has never been a 3 week wind drought recorded on the North Sea. Wind droughts on cloudy days are even more rare.
You don't need to have complete wind drought to have issues (three weeks with only occasional spikes topping at 50% available power is the kind of behavior I'm referring to, and this is routine). And most wind turbines aren't located in the middle of the North sea either.
not three, but 2022 saw a two week period of wind drought in the north sea.
This was well documented.
The same is true of other types of energy production... like when France lost 50% of it's nuclear simultaneously...
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20220902-france-to-restar...
Ultimately every technology has some unplanned downtime, and there will always be a risk of too much not generating simultaneously.
Who paid for these studies? "order of seasons" - that can't be right.
Why do you think that can't be right?
Solar and wind generation themselves are seasonal and don't match the seasonal patterns of demand. So you need to time shift across seasons if you don't have the instantaneous (base load) capacity available all the time.
You might say, well, just build more windmills or solar farms. Doesn't help when it is dark and calm. Your "overbuild" is useless in that situation. So you need storage (or other base load generation, fossil or nuclear).
In this study, it is estimated that Germany and California both need about 25TWh of storage to time shift energy supplied by intermittent sources to other parts of the year. The study claims $5 trillion to purchase batteries to store that much energy.
http://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-batteries...
No, you just need peaker plants which can run for the 1-3 weeks per year when there is no wind in the winter.
Battery capacity will never be built to exceed 1-3 days of demand.
And because they are run so infrequently, they don't need to be fancy or efficient - just cheap and powerful. It's easier than one might imagine, but it helps if you think of scale along the lines that horsepower is roughly comparable to kilowatts, so a 200 horsepower car engine (which is small) can provide 147kW, or enough power to supply around 147 houses on average (depending on a lot of things obviously - in a climate with high heating/cooling demand it won't manage as many houses). It's not uncommon to have single diesel generators capable of generating 4MW of electricity running around on train tracks.
So you need to have two generation systems. Certainly possible, not cheap.
I assume in this conversation that we want:
* reliable power
* affordable power
You're kind of making OPs point though - that post was written by a retired 80yr oil engineer who just blogs into the aether because he hates solar and wind.. the $5 trillion estimate was him literally just making up numbers.
To critique this more specifically - in that post he assumed we would spend $5 trillion on batteries, and they would still cost the same $200/kwh that they cost in back in 2018. Even if his other assumptions on the capacity required were valid (they aren't), costs have already fallen below $100/kwh since learning curves exist - so his scary $5 trillion number is already below $2.5 trillion. Add in the additional cost savings and amortize that investment over a decade and you're talking about maybe 3.5% of the Federal budget?
So it isn't clear how much capacity has been lost in this switch. They may also be other changes in the generation portfolio that aren't discussed in the article.
I understand why people are so quick to argue against batteries as a power supply when they are unproven in a given scenario. I think it's a narrow way of thinking that ignores everything we know about the progression of technology and devalues the skilled professionals actually doing this work, but I understand. What I don't understand is what compels a person to grasp at straws and pose speculative "what ifs" after a project is successfully in operation. What more do you need? Does it need to run fifty years before you're convinced?
Well in terms of the various capabilities the article highlighted
* dark starting
* capacity
* grid stabilization
I think you are mis-interpreting my comment and being unfair in characterizing what I'm saying as "narrow minded" or "grasping at straws".
The old coal generator provided three key values to Oahu, Keefe explained: energy (the bulk volume of electricity), capacity (the instantaneous delivery of power on command), and grid services (stabilizing functions for the grid, wonky but vital to keeping the lights on).
The battery directly replaces the latter two: It matches the coal plant’s maximum power output (or “nameplate capacity,” in industry parlance), and it is programmed to deliver the necessary grid services that keep the grid operating in the right parameters.
Yes, I was talking more about an attitude than your specific concern. Though your framing still contorts the issue in a way that makes a coal plant appear like the proper, ideal solution while this new "problem" method is some shady, questionable alternative that must have hidden flaws. And you continue to list more speculative flaws in this comment as well.
What do you think of the idea that, given proper experience and technology, we can have a grid system that does not suffer from inadequate wind/solar/hydro/battery? That is the mindset we need to shift our framing to as these technologies continue to expand and prove themselves on larger and larger scales. I have no doubt people had to shift their framing around the entire idea a reliable coal-based electricity production once upon a time as well.
With solar power, if there isn't sufficient energy storage, then any excess power generated has to be discarded. With a battery system it gets stored for later use. So the energy component from shutting down the coal plant is partially replaced, depending on how much excess solar power is available.
It's Hawaii. They're literally sitting on an infinite energy supply and have almost continuous sun (apart from nights).
This is not a new problem, and there is no silver bullet that will solve it. Just a long sequence of incremental improvements that will make the difference over decades.
In the Nordics, the solution is primarily hydro + wind + nuclear, with cogeneration from district heating and industrial processes. Old-style power plants that generate electricity by burning fuels are largely obsolete, and the cogeneration plants are also phasing out fossil fuels. The solution is within reach, but it took decades to get there.
Other regions will need other solutions.
The main problem with replacing a fossil fuel plant with renewable + batteries is finding a battery system that can hold energy over a sufficiently long period of time and has enough capacity to replace solar/wind when it is dark and calm.
Synthesizing gas seems like a good solution. With electricity prices often dipping into the negatives thanks to all the renewable fluctuations, synthesized gas should be able to compete with any other base source on price.
Generate gas when electricity is cheap enough and use it to generate electricity when it's expensive enough. Basically a profit-pump once the initial investment is paid off.
Storage is useful at all sorts of scales, from microseconds to years. Interseasonal or even a dunkleflaute's worth is hard at the moment, though we manage it with heat and with (eg) methane already in places. It's happening. Plus we are getting better at moving demand to when energy is available.
Fun fact - the exhaust cooling tubes at that old plant dump out into the ocean and create a really warm environment that is rich in sea life and a very popular diving/snorkeling spot. It's even called Electric Beach. https://www.snorkeling-report.com/spot/snorkeling-electric-b...
I lived there for a few years and tried to snorkel there - but my submechanophobia prevented me from getting more than a few feet into the water. Seeing those big spooky tubes scared the ever living shit out of me.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fe...
I thought usually heat like this is regarded as "pollution" and will ruin environment somehow. I've heard something like that about nuclear plant. Although maybe it's a case by case basis
It depends where you’re putting the waste heat. If it’s a small river or pond then it’ll heat the pond and meaningfully change the ecosystem. If you drop it into the ocean then nothing really happens because the ocean is pretty big. And a zero carbon source like nuclear will net reduce the temperature of the ocean if it replaces something like coal.
That’s not how it works though. The place where you release the water, a local hot spot is created and the heat takes a while to gradually dissipate. If you continuously release hot water, then a permanent localized hot spot is created.
This may work for some marine species, but will also be damaging to others. If it affects a keystone species negatively, like say corals, then a larger die off can happen.
This is the exact logic why desalination plants are widely considered bad. Yes, if you look at the entire ocean, you’re barely increasing the salinity of the water, but for the local neighborhood where the waste water is released, the salinity goes up to the point that even saltwater fish find it toxic.
It's usually a silly complaint, though. The change is to a small area, and small areas are naturally different temperatures for all sorts of different reasons. Dredging the beach and changing the water elevation will have similar temperature effects.
At electric beach it creates a nice, unique ecosystem and there's nothing wrong with that.
I wouldn't consider the entirety of Gulf of California a small place. They're staring down environmental impacts from desalination plants.
Desalination is a different process to heating though, for instance the sea won't lose excess salt to the atmosphere.
The sea does lose salt to the atmosphere, just less than it does of water, so it doesn’t reduce salinity. Wave action releases enough salt to smell salt in the air, and a bit makes it up higher to provide cloud condensation nuclei.
Wow! I didn't know that.
It's a good thing the problem we're talking about doesn't exist there
I think the issue is that location matters. What can be a huge problem in one location, might not be a problem in another location.
There is nothing inherent with desalination that requires releasing the salt back into the ocean.
There is a big difference between separating sea water into fresh water and a concentrated brine against separating sea water into fresh water and solid salts. If you could do the latter efficiently then it would be easy, put it back under ground or sell it to people as sea salt, use it to salt the roads etc.
So just dump the hot water a few kilometers out, where there's a desert.
There’s nothing fundamentally destructive about climate change. It’s the pace and scale of climate change which is potentially catastrophic.
Ecosystems experience “disturbances” all the time. Trees fall. Animals dig up plant beds. Extreme fire and ice kill flora and fauna. These “disturbances” aren’t truly often destructive though: they encourage succession and biodiversity. Seed banks and migration allow new life to be expressed and fill the disturbance.
The problem is when disturbances are coming so fast and on such a wide scale that migration can’t keep up or the seed bank is destroyed. In such a situation, biodiversity and overall living mass can nosedive. You end up with a desert which will take millions of years to come back to life.
In the power plant example, the heat “pollution” likely killed off or drove off some species within an area. But it was isolated enough that surrounding ecologies and latent genes could fill the hole, and in fact drive succession and biodiversity further forward than it had been. That’s fine and good, and not true “pollution” in my mind. Or at least not the bad kind.
“The planet is fine. The people are fucked.”
Environmentalism will only matter once it’s not so profitable to ignore.
Is it good that this plant is dumping a bunch of heat into the ocean? Probably not, but it made some people’s lives better for some number of years. Hopefully the long term consequences don’t make some large number of people’s lives much worse for a longer number of years.
Environmentalism is a very good business for a lot of high class people right now.
This feels very cynical.
Grifters taking advantage of a problem for personal gain doesn't mean that the problem doesn't need to be addressed, does it?
Quick chemistry lesson; when you dissolve a solid into liquid it becomes more soluble as the temperature increases. Temperature equates to the energy with which atoms move around, so the solid can sort of shake free of its pattern and fall into solution. Liquids and gases have the opposite relationship where higher temperatures means lower gas solubility. Gases are already free, so when the temperature is lower its more likely that the bonds of the liquid are stronger than the gases propensity to bounce around.
Which brings us to heat pollution; heating a river will cause the water to lose oxygen (which it already does not carry much of nor very well). Anything that depends on that oxygen will suffer as a consequence.
Minor technicality some solubility does decrease with increasing temperature.
This topic is interesting especially in the context of beaches and coastal areas.
At least in Australia, a lot of beaches are eroding. Fast. Like, the Gold Coast is basically completely artificial at this point, they truck the sand in from somewhere else on a regular basis to keep the tourism and Schoolies dickheads constantly flowing through: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-02-20/the-gold-coast-ever-d...
In that very same Gold Coast (and in many beaches in Australia, and I believe other parts of the world), they erect literal "shark nets" to fence off the parts of the coast that people frequently swim in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shark_net
So my point is, we already engage in a terrific amount of ... I kinda wanna call it "shitty terraforming" ... in our coastal areas. Turning a few kilometer stretch of beach into a jacuzzi doesn't sound so bad to me when framed in that context :)
depends on if it pales in comparison to the volcano vent heat output.
Ironically some power plants in Florida are now critical to the survival of manatees there. Winters are becoming more varied in temperature and with many natural hot springs now unavailable, manatees have found shelter near waste water outlets from these plants.
For me it would be less about spooky and more that I don't want to swim anywhere near whatever they are pumping out.
It's clean water. They circulate ocean water through a heat exchanger to cool the steam condenser.
Nuclear plants do the same thing.
The water can be clear to begin with, but I assume some chemicals are leaching into it from the entire apparatus that the water cycles through. Just like clean water was cycling through lead pipes in Flint and eventually became toxic.
Well, it would be an invalid assumption. The pipes are just pipes. There are no chemicals.
Do you also avoid touching water from your kitchen sink? Your bathroom shower?
You think there's no chemicals in your tap water? You think nothing leaches from your plumbing into the water either?
I think you are probably shower and bathe in water that flows through pipes, so it seems absurd to be concerned about the same water/pipe combination used elsewhere.
If you don't shower or bathe or use modern plumbing infrastructure then please, by all means correct my mistaken assumption.
This response seems silly. Do you not take shower or baths in tap water? The issue is the same.
I believe in normal circumstances its neglegible and not worth worrying about.
Ostensibly it is just warm water from a cooling system. Like a PC watercooling system, except the reservoir is literally the Pacific Ocean.
How do they deal with the corrosive effects of salt water? Or do they remove most of the salt before using?
Every large ship engine is cooled by raw ocean water, mostly through a heat exchanger system. Basically instead of cooling the engine coolant with air like on your car, they cool it with ocean water.
In my experience in smaller boats using the same system (100-150 feet) corrosion is less of a problem than growth and calcification. Mostly we just dissolve everything with acid every once in a while on those systems.
And sacrificial zinc anodes that get replaced regularly.
Probably just using stainless steel or similar material for the pipes. It would be too energy intensive to desalinate the cooling water. It is an open system that pumps water in and back out again. It is not a closed system.
I didn't know what submechanophobia was , Is it really common to have a word for itself ?
I hadn't heard of the word either but I sure do have the condition! I was a triathlete at one point, but I would take a very large swing around the marker buoys just in case one might touch me... and the grandparents comment of "big spooky tubes" sent a surge of adrenaline through my body. I feel so seen:)
likewise, learning to sail as a kid and having to go around these large partially submerged objects just kicked off some irrational fear in me (and stil does today, though to a lesser degree).
Same.
I also have megalophobia specifically related to ducting and that picture set of my panic response. I hadn’t really thought too much of it, but I wonder if Thr Empire Strikes Back is to blame.
I don't suppose that too many people are terrified of these things, but many (including me) find them mildly unsettling. I imagine trypophobia is similar in that sense.
I agree with you, that would be the exact word I would've used to describe it. Also, since I was a child, I've been scared of pool drains for the treatment system.
Submechanophobia has a wikipedia page, which also indicates that there is some scientific research into this phobia (which does not have a good explanation). So it's not a one-person problem.
I have a theory that this, like fear of heights, claustrophobia, agoraphobia etc. are actually "extremely natural" because they're all good for survival ie. instincts unlearned somehow culturally, but would be the baseline if you teleported a Palaeolithic, Sumerian, Viking or whatever into our modern complex and somewhat claustrophobic technological life.
There's a series of popular subreddits with similar names that I think made the terms more common.
You should check out the subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia/
The Kahe (oil powered) plant at electric beach is still operational. The coal fired power plant that shut down is a little further south of there, closer to Barbers point.
It also shut down over a year ago (9/1/22).
For those confused by this comment, "It" refers to the coal power plant from the article, not the Kahe powerplant in the parent comment. I definitely went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to confirm/deny that Kahe or Waiau shutfown before realizing my confusion.
I probably stared at the picture a little too long.
I've snorkeled at Electric Beach -- underwater you could hear the buzzing from the powerplant. Somewhat surreal and I'm surprised it didn't bother the marine life.
Google Maps location: https://maps.app.goo.gl/d6AchooL8MFjxmoj6
It is a great spot. Can be a tough entry when the surf is up. But overall I would say it is certainly among the best spots on Oahu for shore snorkeling. And it is just a 5 minute drive if you are staying at any of the condos or hotels at Ko Olina.
On the flipside, its not as obvious what coal burning exhaust has done to other parts of the biome. I imagine its extremely damaging. Not to mention, what it does to human lungs.
Evolution didn't create all this life with the assumption there would be electric beaches. I suspect the loss of this warmth will be a small price to pay to reduce emissions and that other parts of the biome will flourish in-line with how evolution developed life in that regions for billions of years.
If you are worried water will get cooler, let me tell you about global boiling…
Cynical joke aside, renewable electrical systems also need cooling: heat pumps for AC, but also cooling batteries, solar panels if you want them to perform well, etc. I feel like it’s best if that heat is used in heat pumps to warm up water for showers, but there might be some waste left for Electric Beach.
I've swam with dolphins there. It's really beautiful for how accessible it is as a snorkeling spot
A phobia or just really disconcerting? I guess it just depends.
This is nice to see. However, one aspect of the green energy push that puzzles/irks me is the tendency to outsource carbon pollution. Citizens of Hawaii might be carbon neutral for energy production, but they are importing goods and services produced by carbon emitting countries/states. We are lucky that economics of green energy vs fossil fuel-based energy are continuing to look better and better. A climate change win is a climate change win. But I guess we just can’t let ourselves become complacent and say that we’ve already done our part because we let other countries do our polluting for us.
Edit: to clarify, I was not referring specifically about the provenance of the battery with my comment about exporting pollution. For example, Hawaii imports cars, electronics, building materials, and has a large tourism industry that relies on airlines.
This is true and important - but subtle and easily misunderstood as simply outsourcing emissons .
There is a fundamental pollution that occurs in a coal plant: its purpose is to combine carbon and oxygen to produce heat and CO2.
There is no such fundamentals in producing a lithium cell or a solar module.
We are bootstrapping this carbon free energy system from our existing energy system - so of course, emissions abound - but once bootstrapped, it perpetuates without fossil fuels.
My mind goes to the question of what chemical byproducts come out of the manufacture of batteries or PVs. Maybe it’s not CO2, but something else. Maybe it’s easier to deal with. And maybe it’s a good tradeoff, or just in certain quantities, but if so what is that tipping point? I don’t know where to look for this kind of information.
One way to measure this is energy stored on energy invested (ESOEI). It answers how much energy is stored over the lifetime of the device compared to the energy required to build it. Lithium batteries come in at around 32.
This isn't bad, but pumped hydro is way better (704). And both options are way better than the ongoing drilling and mining and combusting required for fossil fuels.
way better than the ongoing drilling and mining. . .
Lithium isn’t mined? Producing large/scale lithium batteries involves large-scale pollution.
It doesn't have to however. There is nothing inherent in the mining of lithium that requires CO2 emission, we already have electrical replacements for the industrial vehicles that do the mining in some mines already and its simply a matter of time to replacing the rest. All the solar companies in China run off their own panels and cover their own power needs so the actual emissions are dropping all the time.
Just because an EV being charged emits CO2 today when charged from the grid does not mean that emission wont be reducing over time, it will as the grid power comes increasing from renewable sources. So it is with the production of batteries, PVs and wind turbines a lot of these companies take this as a bootstrapping exercise you have to burn fossil fuels to make the transition but once you do you use the green power to make the next versions with considerably less impact.
If it makes people happy, it must be destroying the planet!
I have no idea what kind of destruction it does. But it's an alternative for making people miserable to the point where it's an stochastic genocide, so it must be bad somehow.
Yeah, I see lots of people saying exactly the same, completely seriously, both online and live. What goes on those people head is beyond my capacity to comprehend.
I have no idea what kind of destruction it does
This is really all you had to say, but since it doesn’t really add to the discussion, my recommendation would have been to avoid replying at all, especially considering the rest of the content…
genocide
IME, the people that throw out buzzwords like this about every issue they come across are some of the most likely to perpetrate it, given the opportunity.
I think there's a lot of institutional skepticism in general. Like the game is rigged, and alternative things are secretly nasty and fueled by ulterior motives. This is not surprising, perhaps it's even warranted.
What's really irks me is the other side of the coin, the things that get a "free pass," like (for instance) fossil fuels and their entire production chain. I see a lot of squabbles about the negatives of various energy tech, and somehow the order of magnitude difference between that and fossil fuels is brushed over, not to speak of oil companies' clear manipulation of public opinion.
While I'm sure some chemical byproducts come out of that, it's important to note that hydrocarbons assuredly make some really nasty stuff along the way [1]. I also wish there was a way to more easily compare these things, but the misinformation around environmental data is really next level. General, consider thinking about renewable infrastructure as more of a stock that accumulates vs fossil fuel usage which is a flow.
If you burned the oil in a wind turbine you would get enough electric to make up for not having that wind turbine for about 10 hours. Similar for the blades, if you burned the inputs you have days of power. The turbine is expected to last for 20 years and so while it isn't zero environmental cost compared to alternatives it is so much better we may as well call it zero.
Not really: batteries and solar need to be replaced more often that coal plant. The current and foreseen material sourcing, production and logistics for solar and batteries rely on a ton of steel which needs… coal! Coal-free steel already exist but is much more expensive, and will very probably remain expensive for a long time.
The quantity of carbon emitted here matters
Not really: batteries and solar need to be replaced more often that coal plant.
The design lifetimes are on the same order of magnitude, and the components of the coal plant need overhauls/replacement as well. It's not that different.
And notice that the coal plant needs a continuous supply of fuel, whereas battery/solar are one-time costs. That's a big difference anywhere, and any even bigger one in Hawaii where you have to ship the coal in.
production and logistics for solar and batteries rely on a ton of steel
Totally unlike coal plants, coal mines, and coal shipping.
Coal-free steel already exist but is much more expensive
If we can't do everything, perfectly, right now, then we should definitely do nothing at all. That's much better, and totally how all technology development works. /sarc
What the "production and logistics for" for coal need? I used to live near a coal power plant, there were several long trains per hour of coal going to that plant. Now I live near a wind farm, and while in construction it had a few semis per hour - maybe as much as trains to the coal plant - but that wind farm is complete and will run for a few more decades with very little traffic, while the coal power plant had that many trains per day every day for all the time it was in operation. (it is now shut down)
Carbon emission is a poor and (purposefully) misleading idea of pollution. Lithium batteries may produce less carbon emissions over their lifetimes, but mining that lithium and producing the batteries is still incredibly ecologically damaging.[0]
Companies, in particular, adore the carbon-centric pollution angle because it allows them to ignore the physical pollution they cause every day, while profiting off of ESG. Microsoft alone will have caused an estimated 240,000,000 PCs to have been junked.[1]
[0] - https://www.instituteforenergyresearch.org/renewable/the-env... [1] - https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/microsofts-dra...
It would be nice if the whole world would transition away from fossil fuels all in lockstep, but that's just not realistic. The energy transition is going to be/already is very uneven. It's going to happen first in the places that have a strong desire to lead and the financial and the natural resources (e.g. abundant sun) to enable that. Hawaii happens to fit all those criteria.
The country leading the renewables transition right now is China. Since they’re also the country that (not coincidentally) builds everything, outsourcing goods manufacturing to them seems like an okay bet, for the climate at least. (And yes, I know they’re building coal, but their emissions are still set to peak because they’re building more renewables than industry can consume while paying to idle coal plants.)
Why are they building coal plants if they are not going to increase their coal fired output?
My guess is that their motive for moving to renewables is more to reduce their reliance on imported oil and gas (vulnerable to blockade in the event of war). Maybe they will reduce oil and gas and increase both coal and renewables use?
Why are they building coal plants if they are not going to increase their coal fired output?
Because 30% of their GDP comes from construction - building coal plants creates jobs. And as a marginal benefit, they even get a spare coal plant at the end. They've been building all sorts of infrastructure projects that don't make sense to build, coal isn't special here.
Or, more rationally - China has closed way more coal plants (small, inefficient, old technology) than it has built new coal plants (larger, new filters, scrubbers, adjacent to fresh coal fields with better grades of coal), in addition to having expanding demand for power.
Currently in China new nuclear construction is slightly below new wind+solar addons, and nuclear+wind+solar are together still a small fraction of total power due to coal.
Yes, China is phasing out coal - but it's a beast.
In the meantime old sulphur filled coal field are being retired, new fields are being opened, and new plants with cleaner burning technology is built next to new fields in order to minimise transport costs (and associated C02 from transport).
It is entirely reasonable to believe that China is transitioning away from fossil fuels in the medium term and that they're freeing themselves from vulnerable oil+gas supply lines in the short term, in preparation for a possible Pacific conflict. What alarms me (for both reasons) is that the US and its allies are not doing the same thing. (*Yes, I know the US itself has plenty of domestic oil, but plenty of our critical allies are equally vulnerable to blockade.)
Theyr rebuilding, newer, cleaner, more flexible plants as in the Chinese system the coal plants need to perform the same role as gas plants in areas with easy access to gas i.e. running intermittently at low capacity factors.
I find it interesting that places like Iowa, Texas, and Kansas are leading the transition in the US despite none being places anything thinks associated with environmentalism. While states you might expect to care are way behind. Hawaii has had expensive energy all along and was an early installer of wind, but somehow is still way behind.
Easier to build in places like Texas, I suspect.
Something I see so much in local politics is that things don't all happen in a nicely coordinated fashion like one might want. Say, building some denser housing with more transit. But people telling you to wait until everything lines up 'just so' most likely want neither. Things happen in fits and starts in the real world.
True but we should also celebrate successes like this. If we wait acknowledging progress until all emissions are replaced we miss the good deeds that happen.
Unless Hawaii was mining their own coal beforehand, I doubt they're losing anything here.
I assume the batteries came from China. In 2023 China installed more solar energy capacity than the rest of the world combined.
I was curious so I looked it up. Currently, geothermal energy provides 10-15% of Hawaii's energy needs. Given that it's highly volcanic, it seems like this could be increased.
For comparison, geothermal power accounts for over 50% of Iceland's production.
Curious if the differences are physical/geological, or some other reason.
Most electrical consumption is on an island two islands over from the volcanoes. Probably also geological: hot springs are not really a thing in Hawaii.
Run an underwater hvdc line like the uk does
Sounds expensive
I believe underwater lines are typically not that expensive (compared to other major energy generation/transmission projects). It's actually much easier to lay a cable in water (just drop it in) that it is over land (where you either have to construct pylons or dig a trench).
Well... the HVDC cables and in particular the converter stations at each end are quite a bit more expensive than equivalent HV AC infrastructure. But yes, it's definitely affordable and there are many submarine transmission interconnects throughout the world these days.
One was just built between Norway and the UK.
They are actually in a trench unless it's super deep. You don't want a ship anchor to catch a submarine cable...
Are you guessing based on installations in other countries, or do you know that?
I would presume that volcanic rock is difficult to put a trench down through. But I am interested to know.
Edit: I found a good article with pictures of the equipment used about water jets to trench in soft seabeds: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/8/6/460/htm It mentions cable ploughs and mechanical trenching machines. I would presume trenching in rock is sometimes required near-shore.
If nothing else, environmental review is a thing for anything that goes into the water in Hawaii, and that is very expensive.
so is having more generation capacity to overcome the lack of power interlink
Easy, just move the volcanoes
Easy, just move the power demand. Make it super cheap where it's naturally occurring, and a wizard, er, the market will solve it!
A huge draw for living on Oahu is the military industrial complex
Good news - the volcanoes are already moving!
Bad news - they're moving at a geological pace, and away from most of the state's population and power demand.
If I were living on an island with a volcano, I'd put "moving at a geological pace" under the "good news" category.
Sounds so simple but in this case the volcanoes are the islands.
It does seem like it would be possible to lay a cable to transmit the power from the Big Island to Oahu. My reference for that is the plan to lay a cable to transmit power from Australia to Singapore.
It would be surprisingly difficult to do, mostly because of local politics and views on development. See https://www.mauinews.com/news/local-news/2017/08/puc-pulls-p...
At the same time, the PUC initiated a proceeding to review progress of Castle & Cooke Resorts Lanai Wind Project, given C&C’s sale of its holdings to tech billionaire Larry Ellison about a year earlier. The docket covered “the uncertainty over Castle & Cooke Properties Inc.’s ability to develop the Lanai Wind Project” as a result of the sale, Tuesday’s filing said.
Even before opening the article I had a feeling I would see Ellison's name _somewhere_. I don't know if the review trigger was an excuse, just annoyance at it being Ellison, or what, but wild how a single person can have so much of an effect.
Nobody is arguing that it is not possible
This is the first time I heard about this so I'm very curious and it turns out of course it's delayed because of talks with Indonesia lmao.
The real crux behind geothermal is hot water. Hawaii is arid and the areas where geothermal does occur is on the "Big Island" and are often considered sacred by Native Hawaiians.
Two days ago there was a storm that damaged some generators and left the batteries very low that they resorted to rolling blackouts, as there was not enough electricity for the island.
https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/update-rolling-oahu-outages...
That seems unrelated to the batteries, couldn't a storm damage the coal plant?
Yes a storm could damage the coal plant with some small probability. But now you have replaced the coal plant with batteries + solar. Solar will be disabled by every large storm due to cloud cover. The grid will certainly be less reliable.
Solar isn’t disabled by every storm. You get some power even at maximum cloud cover and storms only last so long.
Further it’s generally offset by increased Wind power and decreased AC usage, and can be further compensated by increased hydroelectric generation.
storms only last so long
You can have prolonged periods of abnormal weather. As an example, across Europe we had months of extremely low wind in 2020:
https://theconversation.com/what-europes-exceptionally-low-w...
“The beautifully bright and still weather may have been a welcome reason to hold off reaching for our winter coats, but the lack of wind can be a serious issue when we consider where our electricity might be coming from.”
Ie: Lots of solar when the wind isn’t blowing
Ie: Lots of solar when the wind isn’t blowing
Not always. Over months of low wind, there will still be overcast days, and of course, there's that pesky little issue of the night.
Try and find some days where all of Europe is covered in clouds and there wasn’t wind.
From solar panels that we track at my organization the solar generation decreased by ~90% at 90% cloud cover. Cloud cover isn't the most important metric, it's irradiance, but still a good indicator and so yes, in a storm the power generation will drop by atleast 90% probably
in a storm the power generation will drop by atleast 90% probably
This is incorrect for several reasons first we care about Wind + Solar + Hydro not Solar alone.
8X % reduction in solar over 15 minutes sure, but track full days output and it’s not 90% across the full day. Similarly you rarely see 100% of theoretical output over a full day, so it’s really the delta between expected output and minimum output that matters.
Also, you don’t build exactly as much generation as you would need assuming 100% output every single day. That’s just as true for Nuclear/coal etc as it is Solar / wind. Redundancy has a cost, but it can effectively guarantee a surplus.
increased Wind power
It will depend on what kind of storm are we talking. Depending on wind speed, wind turbines may need to lock their gearboxes to avoid falling apart.
But arguably yes, increased wind power before and after a large storm perhaps.
Modern turbines can adjust the angle of their blades to extract less energy from the wind. There’s always tradeoffs so people still chose maximum wind speeds based on the area. But, we’re talking being near the center of a hurricane not just storms at that point.
The storm didn’t damage the batteries, the storm just caused a needfor the energy larger then what the batteries could do
more batteries needed...
More likely that it would affect electricity cables and knock out power in a lot of areas. But that would be true regardless of the power source.
Batteries, like coal plants should be pretty resilient. Wind turbines should be mostly fine as well. The Chinese actually have lots of off shore wind and seasonal typhoons. You can expect some percentage of turbines to need maintenance after that probably. But overall it should be fine. Solar panels basically produce less power with cloud cover. And if they aren't mounted properly there might be some storm damage. But otherwise, that should be fine too. Hail would be a bigger challenge than wind. There were some reports of freakishly large hail stones destroying some solar panels a while back.
Mostly, having a lot of decentralized power generation in the form of wind turbines and solar panels all over the place is a good idea from a resilience point of view.
It literally did not coincide at all, given that the coal plant in question closed in September 2022.
> Two days ago there was a storm that damaged some generators and left the batteries very low that they resorted to rolling blackouts, as there was not enough electricity for the island.
It literally did not coincide at all, given that the coal plant in question closed in September 2022.
You simply don't get it. You're oddly requiring the bad storm happen soon after the plant was closed down for there to be a connection, which is obviously not the case. One can take an action which creates a vulnerability that takes some time to finally cause a problem.
You're saying something as silly as: the removal of the bolts holding in the emergency exit plug did not cause the hole in Alaska Airlines flight 1282, because the door didn't fly off immediately after the bolts were removed.
OP edited their post after this reply and removed the word ‘coincide’. It’s why multiple replies have it.
The original lack of capacity was caused by two malfunctioning units in a thermal plant. The capacity from this coal plant could only have allowed for one more failed unit.
Weak correlation if any.
If they kept the coal plant operational for when solar is not viable (shocker, I know, we can’t always see the Sun), then it wouldn’t have happened. Any point after September 2022 that they suffer a lack-of-solar-based blackout directly coincides with lacking the reliability of a coal power plant.
It doesn’t coincide, as the coal plant shut down in 2022, more than a year before this storm.
Wouldn't it have to have happened after the plant shutdown in order for it to coincide? If it happened prior, then it would have been clearly unrelated. If you shut down a power plant and run into power issues down the road, a connection seems likely.
Oh hey that's why my power went out!
What powers Hawaii at night?
Plenty of oil. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Hawaii
Coal was only a small percentage of the energy mix in the last decade.
Can we move on from the tired old "haha idiots forgot about night time" slam on renewable energy yet?
Well, it’s a bad argument made that way, I agree.
But let’s at least be honest about the necessity to massively overbuild intermittent sources (and expensive storage) to provide reliability when we compare $/MWh.
An honest discussion of that should probably include the ecological and health impacts of coal, and the ongoing dramatic decline in cost to add new solar/wind capacity. It's cheaper even factoring in variable production, and this battery project is part of how you address intermittency.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:3-Learning-curves-fo...
I don't know where that linked dataset is from, but almost every claim I've seen for the LCoE of wind/solar being lower than any fossil fuel source excludes the cost of energy storage. Latest estimates[0] put solar and wind roughly at par with combined-cycle gas plants, but without the cost of addressing intermittency.
Plus, it would be probably unwise to extrapolate the current downward trend in costs for the relatively new technology (meaning early in its marginal cost curve) of utility-scale solar and wind that it would continue to get much cheaper.
The two factors combined would suggest that current energy policy in Hawaii is likely to result in increased costs for the consumer down the line.
[0]: https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/aeo/pdf/electricity_generation....
2019 numbers: https://www.nrel.gov/news/video/lcoss-text.html
California has contracts with 8 Minute Energy to buy energy from their solar+storage plants for 4 cents per kWh.
That system has 4 hours of storage. It is extremely disingenuous to compare that to fossil fuels.
4 hours is all that's necessary in a large grid that's well distributed and diversified.
Agreed, it's amazing what you can do with an idealized grid. But that grid does not exist, and is still quite far away from ever existing. Meanwhile, the costs they present are for today.
When the public (and even policy makers who know should know better) see these numbers, they fairly assume that the sources are being measured by the same criteria.
Lazard LCOE 2023 puts solar PV including storage as cost competitive with natural gas CC plants.
The very first chart puts solar+storage at $46-102/MWh, with gas at $42-101/MWh.
https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost...
And hidden away in the footnotes, they hide the fact that they are modeling 4 hours of storage.
It is so blatantly dishonest.
I don't know where that linked dataset is from
Scroll down a bit under the graphic. https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth (which has some more dramatic charts, and a lot of explanation)
Can we move on from the tired old "haha idiots forgot about night time" slam on renewable energy yet?
Not likely. Identity politics never goes out of style.
That is not idpol
Sure it is. The side that complains about “identity politics” engages in plenty of it. Being anti-renewable is one of those identity bits - from rolling coal to Trump thinking windmills give you cancer.
See also: “cancel culture”
Can we move on from the tired old "haha idiots forgot about night time" slam on renewable energy yet?
maybe if they move to volcano power plants
I mean, you're commenting on a post about a battery which can help to solve this problem (albeit this battery alone probably doesn't entirely solve it).
Do you think batteries stop working at night?
Call me cynical, but I think every state should keep at least 1 coal power plant running forever to maintain skills and supplies. Coal is one of the most abundant natural resources in the USA. In national emergencies we can fall back on it, but not if we paint ourselves into a corner.
Hi cynical! Overhead is the sun - it is a massively more abundant energy resource than coal could ever be. It has run for billions of years and has at least one more left in it. Coal is a finite resource and not a very pleasant one to mine.
Solar generation is generally quite dispersed instead of few monolithic coal plants.
That's just solar. There is also wind and wave, geo-thermal and many more ways to generate electricity (power). That's diversification and that surely is easier to defend.
I would suggest that relying on one power source is painting yourself into a corner and then drinking the paint.
I would suggest that relying on one power source is painting yourself into a corner and then drinking the paint.
You’re aware that that is exactly what the GP poster was arguing against, right?
They seemed (to me, by omission) to really want to maintain the status quo.
I understand a "back out plan" but it turns out that there are unfortunate side effects to burning fossils, so it isn't a really decent plan.
Not once did GGP suggest an alternative. No one really wants to drink paint but in the immortal words of Mr F Gump: "Stupid is as stupid does".
I think the counter argument is that renewables are never going to replace coal/oil/gas completely as there will always be the boogey man of “what if there is no wind/sun”. Having a small amount of fossil fuel based capacity in reserve would make a huge difference politically and of the options, coal is probably the best for that.
It is less environmentally damaging than maintaining fracking operations for oil/nat gas, extremely abundant in the U.S., and can be spun up or down on the order of hours so emissions can be kept minimal when plants are not needed.
The backup capacity can eventually burn e-fuels, not fossil fuels, so that counterargument fails.
What I think is that solar will become the primary power source, so coal might be good for backup (for the US). GP didn't blamed solar.
Fair enough, but bear in mind that "solar" effectively created coal and oil! We don't need a backup as such - but the renewables need a bit more time. We have burned oil for millennia. Solar is only about 50 years old.
I still drive a petrol (gas) powered car and even when I eventually get my eye wateringly expensive electric car, I might have range issues, despite living on a small island group off of Europe - the UK.
However, that new car (with loads of plastics etc etc) will run on unicorn farts ... electricity. What generates that 'leccy is another matter too.
You and I cannot change the world but we can at least point ourselves in the direction that we would like it to go. For me that would involve less fossil fuels.
What "one power source" do you think they're arguing against? The person you're replying to has noted that renewables are diverse and abundant, while refuting the notion that coal is important to the US because of its abundance because it's less abundant than many other sources of energy.
Its like bloody whack a mole here.
I'm a big fan of solar and renewables, but at the same time, in the past there have been massive volcanic eruptions that have blocked out the sun for extended periods of time [1]. So in my mind, the post you were responding to makes a very good point.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tambora-1815-volcanic-eruption/
I mentioned a few other too and as you say - the clue is in the name - renewables. Coal isn't renewable. The Carboniferous period only gifted us only so much to play with.
There have been some impressive sun blocks in the past but if, say, Yellowstone went off in a doomsday scenario, then we would not be worrying about electricity generation. It is far more likely that we (humanity as a whole) would be back in the stone age but with jolly refined language skills!
If we have all the other renewables available we do stand some sort of a chance of keeping going, despite a cataclysm.
I don't think that banking on coal n that is a good idea.
Technology-wise, isn't it a lot easier to build a coal plant than it is to build PV panels? Obviously this is not a problem right now, but imagine a disaster scenario where a good amount of high-tech industry is non-operational. Or even a geopolitical crisis where we lose access to enough of the raw materials or manufacturing capacity to make the panels.
(Does the US even manufacture PV panels? Or are they mostly -- or even all -- built overseas?)
Yes! And the same for chariot manufactures.
Gas and oil are also abundant and they are less polluting. Hawaii mostly runs on oil.
https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/clean-energy-hawaii/our-cle...
Hawaii is located thousands of miles away from the US with no coal deposits.
I suppose this wouldn't be the first time the mainland introduced onerous requirements onto its territories (see: Jones Act)
Just for fun I looked up what the plans are in the Netherlands (17 million residents), where I live. Governments all over the world are going to start installing these grid-scale batteries in the coming years, because without them we can't really transition to renewables.
Anyways, the Dutch govt has allocated 400 million EUR [1] and expects to get 160MW - 380 MW installed for this amount (so 1-2x this battery plant in Hawaii). But the national network operator is reducing connection fees and hopes to trigger 2-5GW of new battery capacity by 2030. That's quite massive.
Expect similar new installations pretty much everywhere.
[1] https://www.pv-magazine.com/2023/10/09/netherlands-allocates...
There are other types of storage than batteries: flywheels, pumped water storage, etc., and each has a time frame where they are competitive. I’m assuming that with 400M EUR, there’s room for all sorts of short-range and long-range options.
I suspect for the Netherlands, wind supply is the main factor. That typically needs week-long storage; not sure what’s the best tech at this time frame.
Pumped hydro is really great at scale, and it's a shame we don't build more of it. But it needs at least a substantial hill, with the ability to build a reservoir at the top and at the bottom (ideally just a natural lake at the bottom). The Netherlands is a uniquely bad place for them due to being famously flat.
Hawaii on the other hand could probably do some really effective pumped hydro plants. I wonder why the have so many battery installations instead?
Aside from being flat we also lack space, we live with the water so it needs space to flow into places that are not populated. This means large swaths of land are dedicated to what is essentially overflow capacity. Perhaps there is some energy that could be extracted in the process, but it makes it very hard for it to be a reliable backup.
Pumped hydro is really great at scale
What's your citation on this? I've spoken to a few civil engineers on this topic and they just laugh and say people that promoting pumped hydro haven't done the math and do not realize the size/scale of the mechanisms that they are proposing, and that they are thus not at all feasible.
I don't think you can just say "pumped hydro is really great at scale" sans evidence.
It is in fact possible to benefit from pumped hydro even if you have no significant height differences in a certain area. How? By creating a basin inside of an existing body of water and emptying/filling when there's over/under supply of electricity.
I remember reading a couple of years ago that there were plans to construct such a "valmeer" inside of the Ijsselmeer, but I can't find much about it now so no idea whether it's been canned or not.
Funnily enough next to wind also solar is one of the major renewable sources in the Netherlands. So also day-night storage would be important.
The Netherlands actually is second place in terms of solar generation per capita in the world (only Australia has more).
Too bad the source doesn’t say it either. Is that 160-380 MWh of energy storage or 160-380 MW of peak output power?
It’s probably the former.
For 400 million EUR you can buy ~300 Tesla Megapacks 2XL which together give ~300 MW of output power and ~1.2 GWh capacity.
Yup - batteries are also getting fast tracked in the TSO connection queue in NL. Lots of good news for Tesla and other battery manufacturers.
Batteries can't replace energy generation, it still needs to be generated to be stored. Though it does give you more control over how you generate the power.
Fossil fuels are often used to generate electricity for batteries, which just moves the problem elsewhere. For example, you may be charging your EV with energy generated by a Coal plant.
Similarly, outsourcing manufacturing often moves pollution from domestic to international. If a country heavily consumes goods imported from somewhere like China, they are part of the cause of those greenhouse gases. The pollution has simply been outsourced
Not trying to make a specific point, but often people only think one level deep about these things.
I would say this argument is only thinking one level deep.
If you charge your EV with a coal plant, is that better or worse than a gas car? (It's better.) Are EVs actually being charged with only coal power? (No.) Do we have the technology to replace polluting power plants? (Yes.) Are renewables cheaper than fossil fuels? (Yes.) Do gas cars have the ability to get more efficient as power generation changes? (No.) Do EVs? (Yes.)
Does manufacturing overseas contribute to global warming? (Of course.) If you factor this in, how do US carbon emissions look? (They're going down, both total and per-capita.)
I see you've drawn conclusions from my post where there weren't any... only facts. I didn't make any statement in opposition to pursuing renewables.
Carry on!
The particular facts you chose and your framing express skepticism about the way renewable energy is pursued. I provided additional facts which paint a different picture. Carry on!
Before feminism, there were no nuclear bombs built.
After feminism, there have been thousands.
I'm only stating facts here.
but often people only think one level deep about these things.
In my experiences the ones who care about zero-carbon and renewable energy have thought very deeply about these things.
Fossil fuels are often used to generate electricity for batteries
Yeah, but renewables are already cheaper that fossil fuels in most cases. And charging batteries is one of the most flexible loads for a renewable grid. I don't care if I charge my car on monday or friday.
For example, you may be charging your EV with energy generated by a Coal plant.
This example is just completely irrelevant by now. Coal is dead.
Even then, it's much better to move the pollution away from where people live, and where you have an opportunity to clean the exhaust gases. (if your country cares about those kinds of things). It's also more CO2-efficient, even when not counting future battery recycling.
If a country heavily consumes goods imported from somewhere like China, they are part of the cause of those greenhouse gases.
Fair point, but in the context of batteries I'm not too worried. Both USA and EU are now pretty damn serious about on-shoring on near-shoring both material production and battery production.
Also, we now have battery recycling at a commercial scale, which is far more energy and resource efficient.
We WILL have a couple of decades where the green transition will be quite resource and carbon intensive. But as the first big waves of EVs and grid energy batteries start to get recycled that resource use will fall off a cliff.
I made no indication that renewables weren't a desirable goal, or that we shouldn't pursue them. I made no arguments against renewables.
Simply stating facts that are often overlooked. Very often policy focuses on the visible wins while ignoring the "shuffling" of externalities.
If a policy passes that lowers emissions in the USA but increases them in China as a result (due to offshoring or other means), you'll only hear about the first part
Right, which is why we have renewables to generate power. The coal plant was there to cover any potential power shortfall on overcast days or unexpected late night power needs.
This is a mostly solved problem, it’s just a matter of building out the infrastructure.
The article very clearly makes the point that this battery deployment does not replace energy generation.
Read the article. They explain exactly how batteries can replace (yes, replace) the coal plant. In short: renewables have a hard time matching real-time demand. Clouds come. Wind dies down. What do you do? So in the past they needed that coal plant to add extra generating capacity, when needed. But now, with the batteries, the battery can store the surplus of renewables not instantly needed. Then when clouds come or wind dies done, the energy flow reverses and batteries deliver this surplus, hence smoothing supply.
So, they shut down a coal plant to rely on...another coal plant for power generation. How exactly did it 'replace' the last coal plant?
What? No. They're replacing it with solar generation.
With 565 megawatt-hours of storage, the battery can’t directly replace the coal plant’s energy production, but it works with the island’s bustling solar sector to fill that role. “We’re enabling the grid to add more clean renewable energy to the system to replace the energy from the coal plant,” Keefe said.
Given the small area of the islands and the less-than-flat terrain, I'm surprised they went solar. Have hydro turbines been considered?
Hawaii is not known for its rivers.
You don't need flat terrain for solar. China is papering over entire mountains with panels. https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/sd88u7/s...
Impressive and frightening. Trying to patch an ecological horror with an ecological horror.
You need less area than you might think for Solar. Especially somewhere that is sunny like Hawaii.
What other coal plant?
An impressive technical feat, but obviously there's no way a battery (i.e. storage technology) can actually replace a coal plant (i.e. generation technology) without additional generation. Sounds pedantic, but there are many headlines phrased this way, and many technically dumb people reading these headlines.
With the prevalence of cell phones and laptops in our life, accusing somebody of not understanding how a battery works is tantamount to an insult like calling them a man idiot. Who does not have to deal with charging their batteries continuously?
Further, it seems a bit hypocritical to complain about others reacting only to the headline without reading the article, when that's exactly what you have done.
Your assumptions are incorrect, and it’s perfectly valid to point out that a battery is not, in fact, a generator, when there are many headlines such as this one confusing the issue. There are many man idiots, whatever that means, making assumptions.
This headline does not confuse the issue.
The article is clear on how.
Energy without batteries must be produced when it's consumed. Imagine your cellphone without a battery: it would be connected to a power plant that must be started on demand, and stopped when your phone is not in use.
Now imagine your phone gets a battery, that can be charged with a small solar panel when you're not using the phone. This way, you can use the phone even when the sun isn't shinning or at dark hours, as long as the solar panel and the sunny hours at least match you consumption.
The additional generation you call for comes from the windy/sunny times when people are not consuming 100% of production, so they charge the batteries instead.
In fact, coal can be thought as a storage of energy, not a source: it was stored from sun energy some million years ago when nobody was consuming it, so we can recover some of that energy today by pluging "the coal batteries" in a furnace.
I’m aware the battery in Hawaii uses additional generation, it’s mentioned in the article. That point was the obviously-misleading headline, which is not the first I’ve seen for this type of installation.
The article goes into this:
"The old coal generator provided three key values to Oahu, Keefe explained: energy (the bulk volume of electricity), capacity (the instantaneous delivery of power on command), and grid services (stabilizing functions for the grid, wonky but vital to keeping the lights on). The battery directly replaces the latter two: It matches the coal plant’s maximum power output (or “nameplate capacity,” in industry parlance), and it is programmed to deliver the necessary grid services that keep the grid operating in the right parameters."
One of the cited benefits/features of the battery system is grid stabilization, replacing the inertia of the spinning generators to maintain a stable 60Hz. I wonder if they'll use that to make the line frequency more stable [1]? And, might this make it difficult/impossible to date recordings by their line hum [2]?
[1]: http://leapsecond.com/pages/mains/ [2]: http://hummingbirdclock.info/about
It's interesting, I've heard lots of tales about how we need the spinning mass to stabilise the grid in way which apparently solar, for example, doesn't.
It's not immediately obvious to me whether batteries do or don't provide this capability. I know there are some projects where they are introducing giant flywheels with motor generators (and others where mothballed power plants are run at tickover, though I think this might be more for active / reactive power control), are these just an alternative to batteries with much lower tech or is there something intrinsic about a rotating generator which is hard to reproduce?
The inverters attached to solar or batteries can provide frequency support and even reactive power. They just need to have the smarts to do it at the right frequency, and standards for that have come about in recent years. In the early days, there wasn't much need so by KISS standards it would have been the wrong choice to start with grid-forming inverter design.
People who complain about the lack of spinning mass do not have much knowledge about AC power, even if they understand the prior forms of our grid very well. Classic mistake of is vs. ought.
The "it hasn't been done, therefore it can't be done" argument was wrong AGAIN? I'm shocked, shocked.
When you've worked in an industry for 40 years and there have been basically no tech advancements in that period, and there's strong political filters to keep everybody voting the right way to grease the fossil fuel interests, it's almost hard to blame a person for getting it wrong.
But that wrongness spread through an industry is also an opportunity for those with deeper insight!
In the article: "The Kapolei project provides a first line of defense, called “synthetic inertia,” responding to and correcting grid deviations in real time."
Did energy prices go up as a result?
Here's a graph of Hawaii's power prices.
Note that graph seems to have no data between 1986 and 2018
More statistics until 2019:
https://files.hawaii.gov/dbedt/economic/data_reports/reports...
Average prices are at the end
Thanks, I graphed the data from the table on page 52 of your PDF:
The utility also requested “black-start capability.” If a disaster, like a cyclone or earthquake, knocks out the grid completely, Hawaiian Electric needs a power source to restart it. The Kapolei batteries are programmed to hold some energy in reserve for that purpose. Plus Power located the project near a substation connected to three other power plants so the battery “can be AAA to jump-start those other plants,” Keefe said.
Anyone who has played enough Factorio knows just how important that can be.
Yeeeep. I usually end up creating isolated grids with circuit networks and banks of capacitors to make it so the power production (and fuel production to feed it) can never shut down...
Dyson Sphere Program (an amazing factory builder game, if you haven't tried it) has similar problems -- but no circuit networks. I haven't yet figured out how to make a robust power generation system that doesn't rely on just alerting the operator that something is going wrong...
Getting offtopic but I found Mindustry to be a super fun variation of Factorio due to the more adversarial campaign.
Yeah, I've recently started another run of Space Ex.
Currently have an isolated grid with some solar/batteries for enough boilers to kick start everything.
As I scale, I'll be using a circuit network to set up a steam battery that'll be able to kick start everything and take the hit on surges of power requirements (looking at you Coronal Mass Ejections).
I thought Hawaii largely ran on diesel?
https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=HI#tabs-4
Coal was maybe 12% of their energy consumption in 2021. This is a good change but it's a long way from eliminating all very dirty and expensive electricity sources in HI.
Shh. Be quiet and drink the Kool-Aid.
Thanks, this is what I was looking for:
Category Energy Consumption by End-Use Sector
Residential 30.5 11.9%
Commercial 36.2 14.1%
Industrial 46.5 18.2%
Transportation 142.7 55.8%Curious what this battery actually is. I'd understood "battery" at that scale to be a dam but this doesn't read that way.
This article has some photos. https://electrek.co/2022/09/28/tesla-megapacks-arrive-hawaii...
Lithium-ion Tesla Megapacks https://www.tesla.com/megapack
This article never speaks to costs, as always with green energy, it's only green because the government funds it. How many years can a coal power plant last? How many years do these batteries last. What are the mineral inputs into these batteries? What are the inputs, costs and "renewable" properties of "green" energy? There are none. The batteries end up in toxic waste dumps. All the solar panels end up in the garage.
Stop chasing vanity and use common sense for utilities. How has this impacted their key metrics like reliability, what happens if there is ash in the air for a month and no solar can be provided? They took a proven, reliable production system and turned it into the latest JavaScript framework. Good luck.
Stop making up non-sense that have zero basis in reality.
The costs are fairly well captured in LCOE of these various sources of electricity. Questions like "How many year it lasts" is especially well captured.
How many years do these batteries last.
For grid storage? Probably 1-3 decades. They'll have excellent battery management systems, chemistries that are optimized for longevity rather than energy density, they won't be fast charging/discharging, they'll probably never be discharged to 0%, mostly above 20% probably, which is also very gentle for batteries.
My EV battery is on its 8th year now with very little degradation. That's with primitive cooling (air cooling), older battery chemistry and fairly many charge/discharge cycles, including many deep discharges, since the EV battery is tiny (27kwH).
The batteries end up in toxic waste dumps.
Completely false. Battery recycling is already happening at massive commercial scale, and reaching near 100% recycling. From consumer products like Apple iPhones to car and grid batteries. Car and grid batteries are particularly easy to recycle since you get huge bulk of identical cells.
Think about how insane it is to even consider this a disadvantage for batteries. How insanely many tonnes of coal will a coal power plant have burned in a decade? All that mining is gone forever. With battery materials mining, we'll eventually have enough materials for all the batteries we could ever need.
All the solar panels end up in the garage.
Solar panels are a bit trickier, but that's also starting to ramp up at a commercial scale.
EU is already well ahead with regulations targeting recycling of these things. And given what's already demonstrated commercially, there's no reason to think 100% efficient recycling won't be the reality in a decade or so.
what happens if there is ash in the air for a month and no solar can be provided?
Over a whole continent?
In France several of the supposedly reliable nuclear reactors went down at the same time a little while back. Huge amount of power went offline. They got by just fine with the help of their UK and German neighbors.
Powered by Tesla MegaPacks. Just insane how much value Musk has brought to the world.
Too bad he's jumped the shark these last couple of years.
I guess the idea here is not that they're lighting the batteries on fire and capturing the heat to spin turbines, but that it's buffering renewables to provide a steady baseload?
Steady baseload is not desirable, the energy grid must respond to meet demand, whatever it is.
Batteries are capable of that response, making them far more desirable and valuable than baseload.
Good god. The comments on this thread are the worst I've seen on hacker news.
So you decided to add your own that contributes nothing of value whatsoever?
Hawaii is powered by good old oil. Battery did not replace a power plant. Thanks.
I was honestly surprised that Hawaii even had a coal plant. A 500Mwh plant uses 4,500 tons of coal per day - 45 train cars of coal per day. That all had to be shipped in by boat. But just looking it up, apparently a single "capsize" ship can haul 180,000 tons, so only about a dozen could supply a powerplant for a year.
Every time I think of how much coal is used in generating power, I shudder. Have you ever seen a photo of the coal going into a plant? The train cars stretch for miles. All that carbon just going into the atmosphere. We can't switch to renewables soon enough.
And here I thought Hawaii's fossil fuel of choice was oil imports...
Hawaii seems like a prime candidate for a large-scale geothermal energy plant, yet there's only one project in play, and that too is owned and operated by a private, third-party vendor. Feels like misaligned incentives.
this is misleading at best, outright disinformation at worst. coal generation accounted for only 7% of hawaii’s electricity. the vast majority, 70%, is diesel and oil generators. just like any other island in the world. once again we demonstrate how worthless utility scale batteries are in the grand scheme of things
This is great. I also think Hawaii should explore the new enhanced geothermal systems (i.e. Fervo Energy) that can apparently generate baseload electricity even in places as geothermally inactive as the Midwestern US. Fervo was in fact part of the Hawaii-based Elemental Accelerator's cohort back in 2020, so this must be on their radar.
Oahu seems like an ideal place to do this due to its seemingly higher geothermal activity (at least compared to other places that Fervo can operate), its limited land area, and its astronomical electricity prices.
1. https://www.higp.hawaii.edu/hggrc/fervo-energy-aims-to-incre...
In this project they are using "158 Tesla Megapacks". Is there any utility level battery storage (commercially available) that is not using Lithium?
I remember a while back a stream of projects using molten metals to create (less energy dense but more affordable) batteries for utility scale. Has anything like that come to life?
How's that economic and efficient?
https://ourworldindata.org/battery-price-decline
https://www.energy-storage.news/global-bess-deployments-to-e...
Start where electricity is expensive and/or the revenue you steal from thermal generators (grid support mentioned, synthetic inertia, black start capability, etc) supports the economics, and work your way down as battery costs decline and you force thermal generators to become uneconomic due to compressing their runtimes. Think in systems.
If only the "systems" we were considering were meant to provide limitless and virtually free electricity (nuclear), which is congruence with the "systems" of reducing poverty.
Electricity from nuclear is neither limitless nor free. While we would have been much better off (in terms of global warming) if we had not hobbled nuclear power generation decades ago, at this point it's cheaper and faster to build out solar and wind than nuclear.
The part I hate about the math used in this argument, is that really we should be working with a goal of much cheaper energy production, to enable other green technology.
Yeah, if you use standard new construction capacity planning in some cases solar + wind wins. If you target a much lower average/maximum cost per GW (and higher consumption) nuclear wins.
Things like EVs, electric furnaces for recycling, greener chemical plants and carbon capture mechanisms all become more viable with consistently cheap electricity.
I'd love to see your sources for this. To the best of my knowledge it isn't even close and solar is several times cheaper that nuclear. They used to be more comparable a decade or two ago, but solar costs have dropped dramatically since then.
Mostly the viability studies in the French reactor program.
It heaviy depends on how you set up the comparison. If you look at most current energy markets and say "how can I make money with these rules" the answer is almost always build a small amount of renewables. If you say, how should a government invest to retire coal power and achieve a low and stable energy cost, then nuclear can be viable (in some places).
Anything French on nuclear is simply suspicious, they have a massive interest in selling it - to then double or treble prices during construction, as seen with Hinckley C.
I've seen several studies, none that reached the conclusion you are putting forward. The closest was one that said a lower, but still high percentage nuclear power in France is optimal for reducing CO2 emissions given the nuclear infrastructure that already exists there.
Do you have any specific studies in mind I may have missed?
Keep in mind that solar and wind alone can't power a single city. You need something to compensate, something like coal/natgas or storage. The amount of storage you need, depends on geography and local weather conditions. If your storage comes short, even a bit, the amount of conventional power stations you need to keep the lights on is exactly the number if power stations you would have to operate if you never had invested into wind or solar in the first place.
This is usually missing in typical cost calculations for solar or wind.
Nuclear needs the same compensation. The high fixed cost low variable cost model lends nuclear power to only run at 100%.
Take the California grid, peak energy usage is 2x minimum. Nuclear plants are insanely costly when ran at 100%. Imagine running at much lower capacity factors. Say the peaking plants run at 50%, that means the cost for consumers would be ¢2.4-4/kWh. [1]
Logically this entails that if we can solve a nuclear grid then we can solve a renewable grid since they impose the very similar constraints on the grid operators.
[1]: https://www.lazard.com/research-insights/2023-levelized-cost...
Only if we build reactors in the modern way rather than like the French did in the 1970s. (The reasons why its so much more expensive are complex, but mostly a regulatory ratchet and an tolerance for risk so low that if applied to the rest of life we'd close down parks as too dangerous)
It loses every way. Its LCOE is 5x higher. The PR campaign to save it was about neither its cost nor the environment but economically buttressing the nuclear military industrial complex.
It's SO much more expensive in fact that it's actually cheaper to use wind/solar to electrolyze hydrogen, store it underground in a salt cavern and burn that to generate electricity.
Things like EVs are even less suited to nuclear power because they dont need constant power and can charge while electricity is cheap. Ditto electric heating.
Electricity is cheap mostly when there is more base load than demand; i.e. at night. I don't think you can have that concept if you want to remove base load and just make electricity when the weather lets you.
The problem with the whole nuclear vs. renewables argument is that we don't have the luxury of choosing anymore. We need a huge amount of carbon-free electricity right now, not just to meet current demand but to actively decarbonize our industry.
The only reason we can realistically get to net zero with batteries and renewables is because we export our polution abroad by having China produce everything. And we then ship it back to us using incredibly carbon-intense modes of transportation.
If we had to onshore all that production and actually count it towards our own emissions we'd have no hope of meeting our climate goals with solar panels and wind power.
Enough sunlight lands on the Earth every 2 minutes to power humanity for a year [1]. ~500-600GW of solar will be deployed in 2024 globally, and we are accelerating to 1TW deployed annually [2].
Commerical nuclear fission is unviable at this point [3], even at nimble startups [4] [5], but proponents are free to argue in support of it to anyone who will still listen. Renewables and batteries have reached an escape velocity trajectory [6].
This global energy system will eliminate energy poverty in our lifetime, and like bankruptcy, it'll happen slowly, and then all of a sudden.
[1] https://www.ku.ac.ae/two-minutes-of-sun-enough-to-power-a-ye...
[2] https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/12/25/all-i-want-for-christ...
[3] https://www.lazard.com/media/2ozoovyg/lazards-lcoeplus-april...
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38894631
[5] https://neutronbytes.com/2023/01/24/nuscales-smr-costs-hit-h...
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37502924
Enough sunlights lands on earth every two minutes to power humanity if the whole surface of the planet including ocean was fully covered by 100% efficient solar panels. How is this even remotely relevant when we don't have close to the material needed to achieve that coverage and the efficiency of panels is famously extremely low.
The deployment in 2024 is - as usual - expressed in "theoretical max power". Which is nowhere near the actual throughput, and of course orders of magnitude higher than the "when I need it" actually delivery. Again; big numbers don't mean big results; real life scenario matter here, theoretical best is far less relevant.
Additionally, quoting "pv-magazine-usa.com" on this subject must be some kind of silly joke considering that it could as well be named "lobby-webiste-with-a-clear-political-agenda-to-push-for-photovoltaic-and-prove-it-also-cures-cancer.com" and no-one wold bat an eye. Similarly, other HN comment written by yourself usually don't count as "sources" for statements.
https://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/77565 is all the land that is needed to reach net zero. Certainly, we don’t need the entire earth covered. Replacing just the ~40 million acres of corn ag in the US used to produce ethanol for vehicles would provide 1.5x annual electrical needs of the country, including all light vehicles assuming they’re EVs (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38856518) (solar panels produce roughly 200 times more energy per acre than corn). The thought exercise is to demonstrate how cheap renewables are, their growth trajectory, and to guess how soon this impairs all other non renewable generation sources economically speaking. Clearly, the impairment is coming, as this post demonstrates. We’re simply arguing the time horizon.
The links to my other comments are comments that contain citations supporting the thesis, versus an unnecessary wall of text. No facts I put forth are uncited.
We have enough fissile material to support the planet for 10s of thousands of years, so the nuclear proponents can speak in theoretical maximums and still beat you. You don't have enough raw materials on planet earth to continue making solar panels for the next 10s of 1000s of years, given that you need to replace the panels every 10-20 years (optimistically).
Commercial nuclear fission is completely viable for anyone not allowing it to become unviable with lawsuits. See: China.
Downvote me all you want, but you'll live in poverty when there are no factories in your town because the lights turn off during a snowstorm.
The fifties want their nuclear advertising back…
Nuclear is rather expensive and, with current technology, not „limitless“ in any sense of the word
If just the nuclear power plant companies had to fully handle their waste products from the get go, there wouldnt be the delusion today that nuclear energy is free or cheap.
If said companies were allowed to operate and dispose of waste in a way that had sane risk numbers (say, less than a hundred million dollars per life) then it could be cheap.
Heck, can literally glass the waste and dump it on the abyssal plane, job done. (You can do the maths on this easily enough, essentially zero life is effected and the radioactivity of the ocean increases negligibly)
There is so much uranium/etc dissolved in sea water already, you can skip the vitrification and just dump nuclear waste straight into the ocean without any problems. Pick a deep spot just to stop people from messing with it.
Nuclear is definitely part of the mix we need, but we can easily do multiple things.
For one thing, it's neither limitless nor free - the limit is the amount of radioactive ore we mine, and the cost is the cost of setting up a plant, running it, mining the ore, purifying it, transporting it,... The cost of nuclear is actually pretty high. I'm not talking about safety except that the cost factors in both passive and active safety mechanisms. And, they take _forever_ to build and bring to operation.
On the other hand, the price of solar (even without subsidy) is already cost competitive with _coal_ leave alone nuclear.[1] But it's intermittent, and batteries like the article are expensive.
So, the question is not either this or that, but what's the right mix...
[1]: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/48/Electric...
Yup, absolutely. Places with high energy costs due to being geographically isolated / without a lot of local energy resources have always struck me as some of the best initial places for solar+battery.
I worked on a solar project a number of years back that was one of the first that was actually independently financially sustainable. It was in west Texas in an area that had a highly distributed population and very hot summers. So the existing energy sources were already higher than normal and had the added dimension of spiking demand. Perfect environment for solar to be competitive.
Except the politics of texas being pro oil and anti-renewable?
Texas is certainly pro-oil but it's also a top state for renewable electricity production. It has the most installed wind power of any state and is number two for solar power, behind only California:
https://windexchange.energy.gov/maps-data/321
https://www.statista.com/statistics/183531/renewables-in-the...
Pro-profit is an irresistible force against most other forces
In most states, with regulated utility monopolies that present a very limited menu of options for regulators to select from, the politics of the utility management and the regulatory board are important drivers on the generation mix. But also profit, and utilities make more profit with higher prices under the regulated monopoly model.
In Texas, with an open market for generators, profit is the primary driver of the generation mix. But the difference is electricity generators make more profit with lower cost generation methods, the exact opposite of regulated utilities.
You are correct. They regularly pass laws and regulations with the clear intent to hobble renewables rollout.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/power-grid-adviso...
They'd likely be doing much better if not for that.
Add to that a place that is close enough to the equator that there are no drastic seasonal shifts in PV production.
In the sub/tropics, usually there are only two seasons: wet and dry. During wet season, how much is PV production affected?
In Hawaii, each island has a dry side and a wet side. You can site grid-scale solar on the dry side.
Generally you get less than 1/3 of ideal conditions during rain. Overcast less than 2/3 of ideal.
My understanding is rain/clouds don't drastically affect energy production, and sometimes the first rains can work to clear some dirt and debris off.
Can you clarify your usage of "thermal" here? Most everything except photovoltaic is thermal.
In the US, we usually name the heat source -- coal, natural gas, nuclear -- even though these are all thermal in operation. And the word 'thermal' does not show up in any of those when we talk about them.
The only time the word 'thermal' shows up in US usage is with the 'geo' prefix, and I can't imagine compressing the runtime of a geothermal plant, it's the perfect base-load plant. Are we talking about different things?
I think you’re being a bit pedantic, actually. I work in power systems in the US (though not an expert) and the term thermal being used to refer to coal, gas and nuclear, with the latter a bit flexible, is very common. For example, it’s very common to say “thermal systems provide inertia”.
In following the Ukraine war, I've come to understand that in certain usage, 'thermal' always implies 'nuclear thermal', almost like a euphemism rather than a useful descriptor that includes other forms of thermal.
So I think it's a terrible term in general and it's much more useful to describe the fuel, that's all I was asking for.
I see the word thermal used for coal/gas all the time.
I just finished a day of skiing. I am taking off my thermals. Thermal is an incredibly broad term to let yourself pigeonhole it to a first association.
One could argue concentrated solar power [1] is thermal as opposed to photovoltaics.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power
Coal, oil, or fossil gas are traditionally considered thermal generators. Burn, make water hot, make water do work.
Examples: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Aelectricitymaps%2Felectri...
https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-contrib/b...
Huh? Solar, Hydro and Wind are all non-thermal sources of power.
Edit: Technically I believe Solar can function as a thermal plant as well if you are using mirrors to concentrate light to produce heat.
Yup exactly! https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-unstoppabl...
Don't forget to factor in the thermal generators' owners abandoning their business way before you thought they would, decades before there's a viable replacement for on-demand power to run an advanced industrial economy.
Hawaii, a remote island in the middle of the pacific, pays less than the 2024 pg&e prices for the bay area. PG&E are the worst.
And this is before PG&E gets around to all their deferred maintenance on lines that are likely to start deadly wildfires.
One does have to wonder where all the money has gone, and what the supposed regulators at CPUC are allowing to happen.
So, we're subsidizing rural lifestyles with our Bay Area power bills?
Nope. Rural customers are not the issue. I can confirm they don't maintain rural lines, and they charge 5 figures for 2-3 hours of labor in rural areas, just like in the city.
Even if they were adequately servicing rural areas, that wouldn't be the root cause. If it was, then power would be more expensive in completely rural states than it is in California.
There was a lot of well-documented corruption decades ago (remember when an entire residential block exploded because they used to falsify line maintenance records and move the money into their personal accounts?) I doubt it's improved since then, and I'm pretty sure that's the root cause.
Rural customers are the ones serviced by lines close to trees, which are the ones that are sparking forest fires during hot dry summers.
Power lines cause plenty of forest fires in rural states as well. But the money involved is probably very different, and Californians are bilked for higher rates simply because they are richer than someone in Idaho or Wyoming.
If you don't maintain power lines, then they'll eventually cause fires regardless of where they are.
PG&E employees were caught skimming the money for line maintenance. At this point, the whole grid is falling apart.
The power poles in our area have over 20 degree bends in them, and are nearly as old as I am. Last year, we had dozens of trees take out the single digit mile line between ourselves and the freeway, and PG&E's availability was barely one nine. It used to make news if our area had a power outage over 12 hours. Now, it doesn't make news if the outage is under a week.
Other states in the US do not have problems like this. (Puerto Rico does, but it's not a state.)
Yes, also with your home hazard insurance
That's also not true. Home insurance in rural areas is insanely expensive, assuming you can get it at all. The insurance companies explicitly refuse to subsidize high-risk houses with low risk premiums. This is why it's also becoming unaffordable / impossible to get flood insurance in parts of Mountain View / East Palo Alto.
On top of that the California state government has allowed the insurance cartel to form an artificial monopoly, and then funnel new plans into it, where they can charge a large multiple of fair market rates to homeowners (due to their monopoly status, and the fact that they're an association that was formed by the companies that conspired to refuse to cover the house). Of course, they provide terrible customer service and refuse to pay out after natural disasters.
Here's their web site:
https://www.cfpnet.com
my place in Tahoe is in California but the power comes from the Nevada grid. It costs 14c, so 3x (!!!) less. It’s pretty rural and tree dense :)
Not building Gen 4 nuclear plants conveniently close to major cities and industrial centers along the coastline where they can sink the off the coast a bit...
As a major infrastructure component electricity is one of those natural monopolies that should be socialized, with long term planning by the community (government agencies) and built by contractors on fixed price for delivering an output contracts - with a reasonable price and insurance for not building it correctly the first time included.
The cost of generation is a tiny fraction of the cost of the transmission and distribution grid in California.
We hav pricy electricity because of our "fixed" grid costs, not because of expensive generation. Utilities usually take a fixed rate of profit from T&D, and are therefore incentivized to overbuild as much as possible, and it's the regulators' job to stop that.
A socialized grid probably would be run much better than the one by PG&E, however legislation to buy them out has usually been extremely poorly timed so that the state, as purchaser, would take the biggest losses instead of the investors who backed the bad management team.
That doesn't seem right. Looked up the rates for San Mateo and San Francisco county rates[1] and they're both under $0.400/kWh. On the other hand my parents in San Diego are paying over $0.450/kWh with rates scheduled to go even higher in 2024.
[1] https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/RateComparison
Why is power so expensive in San Diego? Wiki tells me that most of San Diego is served by a separate utility (compared to SF bay area): San Diego Gas & Electric.
I don't know why, but both power and gasoline are even more expensive in San Diego than in the Bay Area or Los Angeles. My hunch is that SD is weirdly isolated from imports and hasn't kept up with very recent growth.
Those numbers are way out of date. See https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/... for the latest
I thought it couldn't get worse and then I saw my parents' San Diego electricity bills. It seems like whatever CA is doing/has done is really screwing its residents.
Granting a private company a monopoly on critical infrastructure is working out great for them eh
yeah that libertarian state government has really let the state run wild.
Oahu's average residential electricity costs $0.43/kWh[0]. My last PG&E bill shows an average cost of $0.35/kWh. Still outrageous considering the national average is less than half that, but I think your numbers are off.
Having said that, PG&E is the worst. Agreed.
[0] https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/billing-and-payment/rates-a...
PG&E is higher: https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tariffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
I think California's IOUs are selling the most expensive electricity of any major provider in the nation.
What plan are you on? You likely are looking at old rates, they jumped almost 20% Jan 1st. See https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/...
In the SF Bay area, electricity prices are so high with PGE, it's more cost effective to burn gasoline in my Gen1 Chevy Volt if the price of gas is below $4.50 a gallon.
So estimating the lifetime of the battery at 5000 cycles and lets say round trip efficiency at 95% we end up with $0.082 / kWh. (EDIT: originally I claimed $0.074 which is wrong) that the battery adds.
So I'm guessing in the long run this will considerably lower the cost of electricity on the island as adding PV capacity is much cheaper than keeping a coal plant running and this battery allows to install much more and use the energy at night. Not sure whether Hawaii has much wind power but it would seem to be rather windy place.
Can you explain your logic a bit more? I'm struggling to understand how you calculated the $0.074, and what you are saying it represents.
Edit: I suspect your calculations just represent depreciation over the batteries lifetime, which is only one of the costs involved.
The capacity of the battery is 565 MWh.
The cycle life of these kinds of batteries is about 5000. Meaning they get about 5000 charge and discharge cycles before their useful life is over. It could be 2000 it could be 10000 and the definition of useful is also dependent on application.
So in it's lifetime this battery can store 5000 * 565 = 2825000 MWh
The cost of the system was $219M.
About 5% of energy is going lost due to inefficiencies.
$219M / (5000 * 565 * 0.95) = $81.6/MWh = $0.082 / kWh.
I am sorry for calculating the efficiency incorrectly in the original post.
This does not take into account the maintenance cost.
Unless these are special a "useful life" rating of 5000 cycles mean that after 5000 cycles your battery will be down to about 80% capacity compared to their original MWh rating.
But full cycle is probably not the complete picture when it comes to grid scale storage since they have some control over the charge/discharge rate and they can optimize their usage, a bit like how electric cars allow you to stay in the 20-80% range instead of going all the way up to 100%.
Good point. In 0% to 100% capacity cycle, the battery will be dead long before 5000 cycles. OTOH, listed capacity may already take into account a more gentle 20% to 80%, or less, cycle. https://www.tesla.com/megapack doesn't provide specs, though.
Thanks! No need to apologise, it's fun to run the numbers.
On top of maintenance costs we probably need to account for finance costs (5% interest rate means repayments of 100mil over 10 years) and the fact batteries don't tend to ever get charged/discharged 100%.
Presumably if you built this you'd want a bit of return on your investment, so you'd have to charge more on top.
TBC: I think these batteries make economic sense (even more so if coal/petrol had externalities baked into their costs), but we don't want to oversell things
At least in theory it should be possible to recondition these batteries to make them useful again, I'm not sure who/when/how much but I suspect they will never be completely worthless.
I wonder how much the one-time costs were for this project, compared to the cost of the batteries themselves:
- land acquisition
- earthworks
- civil construction
- grid hookup
Are you assuming zero cost for the power to charge the battery?
No. This is additional on top of energy production. Energy production cost was already in the base price quoted. The energy consumption will be roughly the same unless the price changes dramatically.
But this allows more PV generation to be put in which is the cheapest way of producing energy.
rountrip is closer to 85% and you have to add the power electronic, also the graph is cell cost of module/pack/gigapack and security systems...
it won’t make any impact on the prices there because it’s a drop in the bucket compared to what they spend importing oil and diesel to burn for the majority of their electricity
The windy side of Maui has a bunch of wind turbines.
Typically at the moment we talk about a price of about $15 a MWH for Wind and $14 for Solar (last year anyway). So around $0.15 p/KWH for the power to charge and discharge it. Assuming the wind/solar is only going for a third of the day that brings the average price up to about $.209 p/kwh when we take into account battery wear cost. That is definitely economically viable in a very large number of places in the world.
Incidentally the totals work out about the same on a home solar system, my battery is 0.09 p/kwh and the Solar output averages out to about 0.07p/kwh but get paid for export at 0.15 p/kwh.
That's close to my guesstimates of about $0.10/kwr. So I tend to believe it.
The important thing is battery storage is competitive with peaking plants over a period of hours. And lowest cost when it comes to short term supplies on the order of seconds to an hour.
Also the logistics of containerized batteries is great. You need a place to put them and a grid connection. And nothing more than that.
People always forget that batteries also absorb power. Having a lot of renewables means there are energy spikes far exceeding what can be used in that moment. Without batteries, that energy is lost. Having batteries means that energy can be buffered and used later (e.g. in the evening). So they improve the capacity factor of existing installed renewables. Add domestic batteries, EV batteries, etc. to the mix and you also get the potential for demand shaping where you charge those when renewable energy production is spiking and prices are low. And of course even though that is currently not utilized on a large scale, all those EVs could technically provide energy back to the grid as well.
Another point is that batteries like this are not actually intended for long term storage. They are instead about stabilizing the grid and dealing with short term spikes and dips in supply and demand of energy. Unlike a coal or gas plant, a battery can respond in milliseconds and be very cost effective for that. Spinning up coal and gas plants is expensive and slow. And they cost money when they are not running.
And while that single coal plant was able to provide so-called baseload; it would only have been able to do so if it was up and running 24/7/365. And that wouldn't be true. They are very reliable but occasionally coal plants have to be down for maintenance, repairs, etc. and this can take quite some time (weeks/months). Same with nuclear plants. So, relying on that to not happen was never a good plan.
Long term storage is always assumed to be needed to compensate for a lack of this baseload. However, baseload is actually a fuzzy notion until you express it in gwh and gw. Hawaii seems to be in the process of proving this might be a lot less than some people seem to assume. At least I'm not aware of them having any long term storage. They'll probably add more battery and resilience to their grid over time in the form of more wind and solar generation and additional batteries. But if these people modeled this correctly and did their homework, this might actually be fine as is. We'll find over time I guess.
Do we currently have enough renewables installed in (eg) the the UK for batteries to increase capacity factor? Is there ever enough renewable production that energy is lost?
Wind farms often get turned off because there is too much Wind, solar is also often throttled. There is a lot of "lost" power that could rather find its way into batteries or H2-electrolyzers.
They get turned off to avoid damage in too much wind, not to avoid overproduction. We only have a few GW of installed solar capacity so it's not hugely important to the overall picture.
In the UK it's easy to see that Wind and CCGT plants operate in inverse of one another, when it's windy most of our power comes from the wind and the CCGT are switched off. And conversely when it's calm the CCGTs produce most of the power.
Yes, but it's at a local level.
One of the benefits of batteries is that they can be spread around and used to alleviate bottlenecks. Building transmission is very expensive, so this is a good early market for them.
These are called Non-Tranmissikn Alternatives or Non-Wires Alternatives:
NTAs are programs and technologies that complement and improve operation of existing transmission systems that individually or in combination defer or eliminate the need for upgrades to the transmission system.
$219,000,000.00 / 185,000 kwh = $1,183.78 per kwh.
Seems kind of on the expensive side, but maybe it's reasonable for this kind of project -- and there might be some big one-time costs like connecting the site to the power grid.
Seems like there's a lot of room to drive costs down though. Some company could plausibly buy the batteries for $100/kwh, sell a completed power station for $200/kwh, and still make a profit.
You mixed up Power and Energy.
565 MWh = 2 TJ
Fat Man was 88 TJ
What I don't get is that this is meant to replace a 180MW coal plan, so we are talking about 3h worth of electricity at full load. Not sure how volatile is the weather in Hawaii, but in Europe, when there is no wind, it can last days not hours.