A battery has replaced Hawaii's last coal plant

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Fat Man was 88 TJ

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.

It’s probably the former.

If you don't like the cost assumptions (they cite sources) you can tweak them and see how the optimum solutions change.

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?

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.

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.

Seasonal sounds implausible to my, but it’s not my area and I haven’t worked in storage for over a decade.

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.

When is that in Hawaii?

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.

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

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?

    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%

Solar generation is generally quite dispersed instead of few monolithic coal plants.

That's just solar. There is also wind and wave, geo-thermal and many more ways to generate electricity (power). That's diversification and that surely is easier to defend.

I would suggest that relying on one power source is painting yourself into a corner and then drinking the paint.

I suppose this wouldn't be the first time the mainland introduced onerous requirements onto its territories (see: Jones Act)

https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/clean-energy-hawaii/our-cle...

"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."

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.

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.

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.

Batteries are capable of that response, making them far more desirable and valuable than baseload.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APUS49F72610

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?

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...

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.)

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.

This is a mostly solved problem, it’s just a matter of building out the infrastructure.

> 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.

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.