[HN Gopher] A battery has replaced Hawaii's last coal plant
___________________________________________________________________
A battery has replaced Hawaii's last coal plant
Author : toomuchtodo
Score : 621 points
Date : 2024-01-10 18:46 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.canarymedia.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.canarymedia.com)
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| https://www.kapoleienergystorage.com/
|
| Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32718968
| tcbawo wrote:
| 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.
| kabanossen wrote:
| 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.
| thom_thumb wrote:
| 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.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.)
| graemep wrote:
| 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?
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| 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.)
| Qwertious wrote:
| >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.
| defrost wrote:
| 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).
| davidw wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| hot_gril wrote:
| Easier to build in places like Texas, I suspect.
| jakewins wrote:
| 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.
| aziaziazi wrote:
| 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.
| slashdev wrote:
| The quantity of carbon emitted here matters
| breischl wrote:
| > 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
| bluGill wrote:
| 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)
| mckn1ght wrote:
| 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.
| irrelative wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_Alley
| marcosdumay wrote:
| 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.
| mckn1ght wrote:
| > 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.
| brucethemoose2 wrote:
| 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.
| bluGill wrote:
| 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.
| standeven wrote:
| 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.
| owlstuffing wrote:
| >way better than the ongoing drilling and mining. . .
|
| Lithium isn't mined? Producing large/scale lithium
| batteries involves large-scale pollution.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| 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.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| 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...
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| I assume the batteries came from China. In 2023 China installed
| more solar energy capacity than the rest of the world combined.
| dralley wrote:
| Unless Hawaii was mining their own coal beforehand, I doubt
| they're losing anything here.
| mathrawka wrote:
| 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...
| Arrath wrote:
| Oh hey that's why my power went out!
| thowawatp302 wrote:
| It doesn't coincide, as the coal plant shut down in 2022, more
| than a year before this storm.
| Shatnerz wrote:
| 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.
| matthewmacleod wrote:
| It literally did not coincide at all, given that the coal plant
| in question closed in September 2022.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| 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.
| tivert wrote:
| >> 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.
| wolfendin wrote:
| 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.
| s0rce wrote:
| That seems unrelated to the batteries, couldn't a storm damage
| the coal plant?
| fuhcghxd wrote:
| The storm didn't damage the batteries, the storm just caused
| a needfor the energy larger then what the batteries could do
| ijhuygft776 wrote:
| more batteries needed...
| asdfadsfgfdda wrote:
| 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.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| > 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.
| Retric wrote:
| 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.
| bobjoe369 wrote:
| 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
| Retric wrote:
| > 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.
| sofixa wrote:
| > 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...
| Retric wrote:
| "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
| sofixa wrote:
| > 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.
| Retric wrote:
| Try and find some days where all of Europe is covered in
| clouds and there wasn't wind.
| sofixa wrote:
| Every night?
| Retric wrote:
| That's not clouds.
| sofixa wrote:
| It's not clouds, but it's 0% solar efficiency.
| Retric wrote:
| Solar is still the energy source even if you're using
| batteries.
|
| The only question is if you can charge in the day not if
| there's clouds at night.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| Seems like a good case for using wind or wave power which
| would presumably provide max power during a storm when
| solar provides less power. Of course, I suppose a bad storm
| could also damage these forms of energy generation as well.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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.
| TOMDM wrote:
| > 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.
| zorkian wrote:
| 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...
| foobarian wrote:
| Getting offtopic but I found Mindustry to be a super fun
| variation of Factorio due to the more adversarial campaign.
| TOMDM wrote:
| 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).
| brink wrote:
| Did energy prices go up as a result?
| cogman10 wrote:
| Here's a graph of Hawaii's power prices.
|
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APUS49F72610
| SECProto wrote:
| Note that graph seems to have no data between 1986 and 2018
| SushiHippie wrote:
| More statistics until 2019:
|
| https://files.hawaii.gov/dbedt/economic/data_reports/report
| s...
|
| Average prices are at the end
| SECProto wrote:
| Thanks, I graphed the data from the table on page 52 of
| your PDF:
|
| https://imgur.com/a/OH5WX4c
| dgacmu wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| dgacmu wrote:
| 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.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| Add to that a place that is close enough to the equator
| that there are no drastic seasonal shifts in PV production.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| In the sub/tropics, usually there are only two seasons:
| wet and dry. During wet season, how much is PV production
| affected?
| PNewling wrote:
| 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.
| doublespanner wrote:
| Generally you get less than 1/3 of ideal conditions
| during rain. Overcast less than 2/3 of ideal.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| In Hawaii, each island has a dry side and a wet side. You
| can site grid-scale solar on the dry side.
| mbostleman wrote:
| 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.
| brianwawok wrote:
| Except the politics of texas being pro oil and anti-
| renewable?
| philipkglass wrote:
| 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...
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > politics of texas being pro oil and anti-renewable
|
| Pro-profit is an irresistible force against most other
| forces
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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.
| myself248 wrote:
| 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?
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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%3Aelectricitymap
| s%2Felectri...
|
| https://github.com/electricitymaps/electricitymaps-
| contrib/b...
| singhrac wrote:
| 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".
| myself248 wrote:
| 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.
| lokar wrote:
| I see the word thermal used for coal/gas all the time.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| 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.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| One could argue concentrated solar power [1] is thermal
| as opposed to photovoltaics.
|
| [1]
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concentrated_solar_power
| shkkmo wrote:
| > Most everything except photovoltaic is thermal.
|
| 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.
| cplusplusfellow wrote:
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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
| IMTDb wrote:
| > 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].
|
| 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| 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.
| cplusplusfellow wrote:
| 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.
| shkkmo wrote:
| 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.
| doublespanner wrote:
| 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.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > 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.
|
| 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.
| doublespanner wrote:
| 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).
| shkkmo wrote:
| 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?
| toyg wrote:
| 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.
| concordDance wrote:
| > To the best of my knowledge it isn't even close and
| solar is several times cheaper that nuclear.
|
| 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)
| AnonymousPlanet wrote:
| 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.
| ViewTrick1002 wrote:
| 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 C/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...
| pydry wrote:
| >If you target a much lower average/maximum cost per GW
| (and higher consumption) nuclear wins.
|
| 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
|
| 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.
| armada651 wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > while electricity is cheap
|
| 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.
| adrianN wrote:
| The fifties want their nuclear advertising back...
|
| Nuclear is rather expensive and, with current technology,
| not ,,limitless" in any sense of the word
| throwawayqqq11 wrote:
| 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.
| concordDance wrote:
| 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)
| lupusreal wrote:
| 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.
| shash wrote:
| 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/El
| ectric...
| alvah wrote:
| 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.
| davedx wrote:
| Yup exactly!
| https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/05/20/the-
| unstoppabl...
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| 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.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Are you assuming zero cost for the power to charge the
| battery?
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| 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.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| The windy side of Maui has a bunch of wind turbines.
| zizee wrote:
| 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.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| 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.
| zizee wrote:
| 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
| belval wrote:
| 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%.
| pauljurczak wrote:
| 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.
| derekkraan wrote:
| 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
| uf00lme wrote:
| 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.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| 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.
| hokkos wrote:
| 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...
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| 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.
| dappermanneke wrote:
| 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
| dalyons wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| ribosometronome wrote:
| So, we're subsidizing rural lifestyles with our Bay Area
| power bills?
| lokar wrote:
| Yes, also with your home hazard insurance
| hedora wrote:
| 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
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| 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.)
| dalyons wrote:
| 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 :)
| mjevans wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| sushid wrote:
| 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.
| katbyte wrote:
| Granting a private company a monopoly on critical
| infrastructure is working out great for them eh
| bsdpufferfish wrote:
| yeah that libertarian state government has really let the
| state run wild.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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...
| DeRock wrote:
| 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/...
| zbrozek wrote:
| PG&E is higher: https://www.pge.com/tariffs/assets/pdf/tari
| ffbook/ELEC_SCHED...
|
| I think California's IOUs are selling the most expensive
| electricity of any major provider in the nation.
| ineedtosleep wrote:
| 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
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| 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.
| hot_gril wrote:
| 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.
| DeRock wrote:
| Those numbers are way out of date. See
| https://www.pge.com/content/dam/pge/docs/account/rate-
| plans/... for the latest
| talldatethrow wrote:
| 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.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| 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.
| bigfudge wrote:
| 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?
| Leonelf wrote:
| 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.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| 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.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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.
| elihu wrote:
| $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.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| You mixed up Power and Energy.
| cm2187 wrote:
| 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.
| huppeldepup wrote:
| 565 MWh = 2 TJ
|
| Fat Man was 88 TJ
| testfoobar wrote:
| What powers Hawaii at night?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > 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.
| reocha wrote:
| That is not idpol
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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"
| bequanna wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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...
| gottorf wrote:
| 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_gen
| eration....
| ceejayoz wrote:
| > 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)
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 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.
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| That system has 4 hours of storage. It is extremely
| disingenuous to compare that to fossil fuels.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| 4 hours is all that's necessary in a large grid that's
| well distributed and diversified.
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| 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.
| breischl wrote:
| 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...
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| And hidden away in the footnotes, they hide the fact that
| they are modeling 4 hours of storage.
|
| It is so blatantly dishonest.
| ijhuygft776 wrote:
| > 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
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| Do you think batteries stop working at night?
| nicoburns wrote:
| 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).
| martin1b wrote:
| 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?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| Night_Thastus wrote:
| Given the small area of the islands and the less-than-flat
| terrain, I'm surprised they went solar. Have hydro turbines
| been considered?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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...
| bobim wrote:
| Impressive and frightening. Trying to patch an ecological
| horror with an ecological horror.
| nicoburns wrote:
| You need less area than you might think for Solar.
| Especially somewhere that is sunny like Hawaii.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| What other coal plant?
| whatever1 wrote:
| Hawaii is powered by good old oil. Battery did not replace a
| power plant. Thanks.
| carabiner wrote:
| Powered by Tesla MegaPacks. Just insane how much value Musk has
| brought to the world.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| Too bad he's jumped the shark these last couple of years.
| lukev wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| 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.
| bix6 wrote:
| Easy, just move the volcanoes
| gumby wrote:
| Sounds so simple but in this case the volcanoes _are_ the
| islands.
| breischl wrote:
| 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.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| If I were living on an island with a volcano, I'd put
| "moving at a geological pace" under the "good news"
| category.
| myself248 wrote:
| Easy, just move the power demand. Make it super cheap where
| it's naturally occurring, and a wizard, er, the market will
| solve it!
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| A huge draw for living on Oahu is the military industrial
| complex
| d6e wrote:
| Run an underwater hvdc line like the uk does
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Sounds expensive
| nicoburns wrote:
| 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).
| brohee wrote:
| They are actually in a trench unless it's super deep. You
| don't want a ship anchor to catch a submarine cable...
| robocat wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| If nothing else, environmental review is a thing for
| anything that goes into the water in Hawaii, and that is
| very expensive.
| davedx wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| One was just built between Norway and the UK.
| KaiserPro wrote:
| so is having more generation capacity to overcome the
| lack of power interlink
| senkora wrote:
| 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.
| throwawaymaths wrote:
| Nobody is arguing that it is not possible
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| 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...
| rtpg wrote:
| > 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.
| mcmoor wrote:
| 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.
| SCM-Enthusiast wrote:
| 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.
| aliowejrlaiwej wrote:
| Good god. The comments on this thread are the worst I've seen on
| hacker news.
| RhodesianHunter wrote:
| So you decided to add your own that contributes nothing of
| value whatsoever?
| gwright wrote:
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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...
| gumby wrote:
| 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!
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Thermal storage is hamburger, hard to re-use, hard to
| transport. You need electrons.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > 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.
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.
| IlliOnato wrote:
| It's very interesting. I wonder what exactly was banned
| that winter?
| mschuster91 wrote:
| 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.
| IlliOnato wrote:
| Thanks!
| soperj wrote:
| > when it is dark and calm.
|
| When is that in Hawaii?
| dylan604 wrote:
| What's the geothermal power potential in Hawaii? Seems like
| it would be a good source for it to me.
| sosborn wrote:
| The only island with active geothermal activity is an
| island without many people (compared to Oahu).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puna_Geothermal_Venture
| IlliOnato wrote:
| 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...
| Aloisius wrote:
| One could install transmission lines between the islands
| if Hawaii's politics wasn't so broken.
| auspiv wrote:
| Equally important: how much would said geothermal cost?
| senectus1 wrote:
| The Hellisheidi Geothermal Power Plant, which is the
| largest geothermal power plant in Iceland cost
| approximately EUR380 million to build.
|
| However a smaller geothermal plant such as the Svartsengi
| Geothermal Power Plant cost only around EUR100 million to
| build
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| snakeyjake wrote:
| 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.
| gwright wrote:
| 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?
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| bink wrote:
| 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.
| gwright wrote:
| Which is why I asked if the weather conditions changed the
| calculus in Hawaii. Great for Hawaii, but doesn't help in
| other locations.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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.
| itishappy wrote:
| 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.)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100-year_flood
| littlestymaar wrote:
| 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.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| There has never been a 3 week wind drought recorded on the
| North Sea. Wind droughts on cloudy days are even more rare.
| eldaisfish wrote:
| not three, but 2022 saw a two week period of wind drought
| in the north sea.
|
| This was well documented.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| 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.
| gpm wrote:
| 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.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > 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.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| 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.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| I never said it will be 10x more expensive: if the unit
| cost is twice as low, then having a 10x overcapacity is
| "only" 5x more expensive, but that's still too expensive.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > 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?
| gwright wrote:
| > 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.
| nicoburns wrote:
| > 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.
| gwright wrote:
| 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.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > 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/...
| DamonHD wrote:
| 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.
| audunw wrote:
| 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.
| chmars wrote:
| It's about 12 weeks in Germany:
|
| https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac4dc8
| akvadrako wrote:
| 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.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| 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.
| schiffern wrote:
| >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?
| gwright wrote:
| Here is a study for two areas, Germany and California:
|
| http://euanmearns.com/the-cost-of-wind-solar-power-
| batteries...
| schiffern wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://pubs.aip.org/aip/jrse/article/13/6/066301/285194
| tick_tock_tick wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| gwright wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9837910
| Tuna-Fish wrote:
| > 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.
|
| It depends very much on where you live. Famously, California
| can get to 100% renewable production with 3 hours of storage,
| because production is very stable, load peaks match
| production well and there is sufficient natural hydropower
| resources available.
|
| In contrast, Finland would need about 3 months worth to hit
| 100% renewable. Because worst load peaks happen when
| production from both wind and solar can be zero for a
| prolonged period, and natural hydro output is limited at the
| same time. 3 months is absolutely not actually feasible, so
| there will always need to be some baseload from nuclear or
| fossil sources.
|
| But 2-3 days of storage is still quite a lot. The recently
| started OL3 power plant had a total construction cost of
| ~11BEUR, making it one of the most expensive construction
| projects ever. It has a nameplate capacity of 1600MWe,
| assuming 95% capacity factor (it goes up when it's cold and
| down when it's warm), if you spent it's construction cost
| building grid-scale batteries, assuming the lowest cost of a
| completed battery project anywhere in the world, you'd get
| something like 27 hours of storage. So even if the primary
| production was free, if you need more than that, you'd be
| better off building the world's largest and most expensive
| nuclear power plant instead of batteries + renewables.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| martinald wrote:
| 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?
| pfdietz wrote:
| If there is otherwise curtailed wind/solar, the RTE doesn't
| matter very much, since the energy is otherwise thrown
| away.
| martinald wrote:
| 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 EUR50eur/MWh at the moment for baseload
| esque power.
| Turskarama wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| 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).
| pydry wrote:
| 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.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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.
| pydry wrote:
| >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.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| 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.
| pydry wrote:
| >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.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| > 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.
| zilti wrote:
| Hydro _IS_ renewable. If you need an example of
| hydroelectricity done right, take a look at e.g.
| Switzerland.
| cornholio wrote:
| 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.
| tuatoru wrote:
| A general principle of backup systems: if you didn't test
| it this month, it's broken.
| cornholio wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| 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.
| beders wrote:
| Who paid for these studies? "order of seasons" - that can't be
| right.
| gwright wrote:
| 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...
| mikeyouse wrote:
| 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?
| oezi wrote:
| 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.
| mnw21cam wrote:
| 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.
| gwright wrote:
| So you need to have two generation systems. Certainly
| possible, not cheap.
|
| I assume in this conversation that we want:
| * reliable power * affordable power
|
| If you relax those assumptions you open up the solution
| space. It isn't clear to me how much you can relax those
| assumptions though.
| jltsiren wrote:
| 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.
| standardUser wrote:
| > 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?
| gwright wrote:
| Well in terms of the various capabilities the article
| highlighted * dark starting *
| capacity * grid stabilization
|
| it sounds like the battery plant is successful. But the
| article itself says that the plant does not replace the
| "energy" component of the old coal power plant, which is why
| I asked the questions I asked. And it is the energy component
| that is critical for really retiring base load capacity
| provided by fossil fuel plants at grid level. Without the
| ability to retire the base load capacity you aren't really
| solving the problem. Costs rise dramatically (you now have
| two energy systems) and/or you have to accept less
| reliability (running out of power when
| wind/solar/hydro/battery are inadequate).
|
| 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.
| standardUser wrote:
| 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.
| not2b wrote:
| 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.
| Kon5ole wrote:
| >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.
| weebull wrote:
| It's Hawaii. They're literally sitting on an infinite energy
| supply and have almost continuous sun (apart from nights).
| itslennysfault wrote:
| I'd think for long term storage pumped hydro would be a better
| solution. Pump water up a hill and just leave it sitting up
| there until you need to let it fall to generate some power.
| whalesalad wrote:
| 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...
| paxys wrote:
| For me it would be less about spooky and more that I don't want
| to swim anywhere near whatever they are pumping out.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Ostensibly it is just warm water from a cooling system. Like
| a PC watercooling system, except the reservoir is literally
| the Pacific Ocean.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| How do they deal with the corrosive effects of salt water?
| Or do they remove most of the salt before using?
| Tagbert wrote:
| 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.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| 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.
| zaroth wrote:
| And sacrificial zinc anodes that get replaced regularly.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It's clean water. They circulate ocean water through a heat
| exchanger to cool the steam condenser.
|
| Nuclear plants do the same thing.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| 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?
| hammock wrote:
| You think there's no chemicals in your tap water? You
| think nothing leaches from your plumbing into the water
| either?
| mab122 wrote:
| I believe in normal circumstances its neglegible and not
| worth worrying about.
| shkkmo wrote:
| This response seems silly. Do you not take shower or
| baths in tap water? The issue is the same.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| 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.
| alex_h wrote:
| 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.
| ChristianGeek wrote:
| It also shut down over a year ago (9/1/22).
| charkbot wrote:
| 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.
| patja wrote:
| 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.
| mcmoor wrote:
| 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
| arcticbull wrote:
| 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.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| 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.
| markdown wrote:
| So just dump the hot water a few kilometers out, where
| there's a desert.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| 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.
| willis936 wrote:
| I wouldn't consider the entirety of Gulf of California a
| small place. They're staring down environmental impacts
| from desalination plants.
| Turskarama wrote:
| Desalination is a different process to heating though,
| for instance the sea won't lose excess salt to the
| atmosphere.
| labster wrote:
| 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.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| Wow! I didn't know that.
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| It's a good thing the problem we're talking about doesn't
| exist there
| willis936 wrote:
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07900627.202
| 3.2...
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| Yes, as your article clearly explains the problem we are
| discussing - heat pollution - does not exist there. The
| article is talking about salinity, not heat.
| mcv wrote:
| 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.
| pests wrote:
| There is nothing inherent with desalination that requires
| releasing the salt back into the ocean.
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| 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.
| burnished wrote:
| 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.
| Incipient wrote:
| Minor technicality some solubility does decrease with
| increasing temperature.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| 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.
| peddling-brink wrote:
| "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.
| mcosta wrote:
| Environmentalism is a very good business for a lot of
| high class people right now.
| skyyler wrote:
| 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?
| cco wrote:
| 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.
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| depends on if it pales in comparison to the volcano vent heat
| output.
| umactually1 wrote:
| 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 :)
| rockinghigh wrote:
| Google Maps location: https://maps.app.goo.gl/d6AchooL8MFjxmoj6
| throwitaway222 wrote:
| I probably stared at the picture a little too long.
| arbitrandomuser wrote:
| I didn't know what submechanophobia was , Is it really common
| to have a word for itself ?
| IlliOnato wrote:
| 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.
| kossTKR wrote:
| 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.
| itishappy wrote:
| There's a series of popular subreddits with similar names
| that I think made the terms more common.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia/
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/thalassophobia/
| yreg wrote:
| 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.
| EmuAGR wrote:
| 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.
| arbitrarywords wrote:
| 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:)
| jonhohle wrote:
| 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.
| scanny wrote:
| 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).
| IvyMike wrote:
| You should check out the subreddit:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia/
| UberFly wrote:
| A phobia or just really disconcerting? I guess it just depends.
| aqme28 wrote:
| I've swam with dolphins there. It's really beautiful for how
| accessible it is as a snorkeling spot
| bertil wrote:
| 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.
| thomky wrote:
| 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.
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| 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.
| danans wrote:
| 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...
| adam_arthur wrote:
| 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.
| tw04 wrote:
| 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.
| mrb wrote:
| 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.
| audunw wrote:
| > 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.
| adam_arthur wrote:
| 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
| wilg wrote:
| 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.)
| adam_arthur wrote:
| 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!
| wilg wrote:
| 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!
| Qwertious wrote:
| Before feminism, there were no nuclear bombs built.
|
| After feminism, there have been _thousands_.
|
| I'm only stating facts here.
| sib wrote:
| The article very clearly makes the point that this battery
| deployment does not replace energy generation.
| cdnsteve wrote:
| 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.
| audunw wrote:
| 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.
| loeg wrote:
| 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.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| 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%
| psychlops wrote:
| Shh. Be quiet and drink the Kool-Aid.
| pengaru wrote:
| And here I thought Hawaii's fossil fuel of choice was oil
| imports...
| declan_roberts wrote:
| 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.
| gerdesj wrote:
| 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.
| profile53 wrote:
| > 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?
| kibwen wrote:
| 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.
| gerdesj wrote:
| Its like bloody whack a mole here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38945399
| gerdesj wrote:
| 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".
| fomine3 wrote:
| 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.
| gerdesj wrote:
| 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.
| profile53 wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The backup capacity can eventually burn e-fuels, not
| fossil fuels, so that counterargument fails.
| profile53 wrote:
| Totally fair and I agree. But what about between now and
| eventually?
|
| Eventually renewables will be all we use and eventually
| fossil fuels will no longer be needed. But between now
| and eventually, maintaining backup capacity is necessary
| and coal is probably the best option for that for the
| continental U.S. Nuclear only works as a base load,
| fracking/oil has even worse side effects, fusion isn't
| ready, and we don't have much untapped
| hydrothermal/geothermal
| novia wrote:
| 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/
| gerdesj wrote:
| 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.
| kelnos wrote:
| 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?)
| bobthepanda wrote:
| 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)
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Yes! And the same for chariot manufactures.
| gniv wrote:
| 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...
| russellbeattie wrote:
| 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.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| 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
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| 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?
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| pfdietz wrote:
| The "it hasn't been done, therefore it can't be done"
| argument was wrong AGAIN? I'm shocked, shocked.
| epistasis wrote:
| 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!
| davedx wrote:
| In the article: "The Kapolei project provides a first line of
| defense, called "synthetic inertia," responding to and
| correcting grid deviations in real time."
| glitchc wrote:
| 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.
| bane wrote:
| 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?
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| alvah wrote:
| 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.
| kibwen wrote:
| 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."_
| epistasis wrote:
| 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.
| alvah wrote:
| 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.
| epistasis wrote:
| This headline does not confuse the issue.
|
| The article is clear on how.
| alvah wrote:
| Your counter-argument seems a bit light on reasoning.
| Feel free to have the last word.
| otherme123 wrote:
| 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.
| alvah wrote:
| 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.
| derekkraan wrote:
| 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...
| andruby wrote:
| 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.
| The_Colonel wrote:
| For 400 million EUR you can buy ~300 Tesla Megapacks 2XL
| which together give ~300 MW of output power and ~1.2 GWh
| capacity.
| davedx wrote:
| Yup - batteries are also getting fast tracked in the TSO
| connection queue in NL. Lots of good news for Tesla and other
| battery manufacturers.
| bertil wrote:
| 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.
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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?
| jonkoops wrote:
| 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.
| Pepe1vo wrote:
| 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.
| dingnuts wrote:
| >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.
| ragebol wrote:
| There is an idea for a reverse reservoir:
| https://nl.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_Lievense
|
| Make a dike ring in eg. the north sea, pump water out of
| the ring into the rest of the North Sea to store power, and
| vice versa to get it back. Easy peasy...
| EricLeer wrote:
| 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).
| danjc wrote:
| Curious what this battery actually is. I'd understood "battery"
| at that scale to be a dam but this doesn't read that way.
| oittaa wrote:
| This article has some photos.
| https://electrek.co/2022/09/28/tesla-megapacks-arrive-hawaii...
| davedx wrote:
| Lithium-ion Tesla Megapacks https://www.tesla.com/megapack
| dappermanneke wrote:
| 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
| DeathArrow wrote:
| How's that economic and efficient?
| DoingIsLearning wrote:
| 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?
| billyboy808 wrote:
| O'ahu just had rolling blackouts last week because 2/6 steam
| generators at the Waiau oil plant went down for less than a day.
| All it takes is one cloudy day and one system failure to cause
| rolling blackouts across the entire island. If the coal plant was
| still online, HECO could've avoided rolling blackouts. Some
| people were out for hours, much longer than the 30 minutes HECO
| indicated on their social media.
|
| I think HECO keeping their entire fossil fuel portfolio around
| until they have enough batteries installed across the whole
| island would have been the smart play, but even with those
| batteries, one cloudy day is all it takes. We needed that 185MW
| instantaneous power on the grid ready to go for situations like
| last week. HECO's total fixed generation on O'ahu is 1600MW. I
| still fail to see how removing 1/7 of the island's total fixed
| generation is a smart move.
|
| Given our remote location, you'd think HECO would keep the fossil
| fuel generation around for a few more years, but utility
| monopolies don't usually have the public's best interest in mind.
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