A huge battery has replaced Hawaii’s last coal plant::undefined
Wasn’t very clear but the battery will be charged using existing renewable sources.
The headline is poorly worded since coal is energy production and batteries are energy storage.
I assume they used to fire up the coal plant to fill gaps but now use the battery which stores excess energy generated.
Edit:
The plant’s 185 megawatts of instantaneous discharge capacity match what the old coal plant could inject into the grid, though the batteries react far more quickly, with a 250-millisecond response time. Instead of generating power, they absorb it from the grid, ideally when it’s flush with renewable generation, and deliver that cheap, clean power back in the evening hours when it’s desperately needed.
Seems pretty clear to me.
Coal is also energy storage, well, all fossil fuels. That’s their primary advantage, on-demand easily accessible stores of energy.
If only they didn’t simultaneously pollute and cook the earth when used…
They are stored solar energy! Releasing the energy also unfortunately releases the carbon into the atmosphere.
No, the plant is full of primary batteries! 4.2 million AA cells!
in terms of usage though, they are quite similar. Coal serves on-demand power, whereas renewables generate power at times that don’t always align with demand. Batteries can take the role of a coal plant if the renewables already generate sufficient energy, just at the wrong times.
All our “energy production” just converts energy from one state into another. Like a battery.
A dam is often referred to as a giant gravity potential energy battery.
The child in me just wants there to be a larger-than-life D-cell battery looming on the horizon.
Hawaii, I hope you all got that larger than life D.
The question is, what brand? Duracell?, Eveready?, Energizer?
Oh my pkcell…
Pkcell for sure. Just be careful with your dingus!
Eneloop
It reads “158 Tesla Megapacks”. But yeah, these could contain Duracell :D
The fabled Z cell
Why did Hawaii have coal plants to start with? The place is literally made of volcanoes!
Ohana means coal industry.
Geothermal energy requires a very stable heat source near the surface. Unfortunately, while volcanoes meet both the “heat source” and “near surface” criteria, they are not at all stable.
It’s still wild to me that I visited Hawaii as a kid, and then several years later. When I went back, a road I had driven on as kid was covered in lava.
the batteries react far more quickly, with a 250-millisecond response time.
Probably also a world record for the most powerful power switch.
Just imagine you press that button, and 185 Megawatts start to flow :-)
They didn’t say react all at once. I bet you it’s a much slower ramp up.
“I cast lightning bolt”
Flicks switch
I tap two islands…
This is awesome, but now we need better battery tech that doesn’t rely on lithium and cobalt. Getting that up to this scale will be hard, though.
There’s some promising headway with molten sodium-sulfur batteries. Not only are they at similar capacity as lithium, but their molten nature allows for the batteries to store energy long-term. The downside is a low cycle rate and the heating requirement. Another promising battery tech is sodium ion batteries, which can use iron as a cathode to output similar power and cycling as lithium
This application needs the opposite of that. They need lots and lots of cycles, easy to maintain, and density is not much of an issue.
Sodium-sulfur batteries are designed for the role of grid storage.
Iron-Air batteries will fill that role
How much electricity do the batteries produce vs the previous power plant?
None. But still it gives power when it’s dark and solar panels stop producing power. It’s a miracle.
Great but the article didn’t address how they are making up for that lost production capacity besides stating “renewables”
My biggest fear is that these dirty, reliable energy producers get decommissioned without a way to provide power on a unique cloudy week that also has little wind.
I’d rather those dirty producers be kept at the ready, just in case.
Solar panels still provide power on cloudy days.
In fact under certain conditions they’ll produce more power than under full sun - solar panels drop in efficiency when they are too hot. (Yes I know this isn’t normal; normally full sun will produce more power, but some people don’t know cloudy days are fine for solar energy production.)
I have solar and battery. They do not provide more energy on cloudy days. You sometimes get lensing for a few minutes but that doesn’t offset the massive loss in production.
That is… not what I said at all.
They did talk about that. The article said that in some cases solar producers have had to curtail production because the thermal plants needed to keep running. Solar will generate a lot during the day that might not otherwise be used, the battery allows that surplus to be stored until it’s needed. They also mentioned that more solar projects are being constructed.
I’d rather have brownouts, and I don’t think either is likely.
Hawaiian Electric’s modeling suggests it can reduce curtailment of renewables by an estimated 69% for the first five years thanks to Kapol Energy Storage, allowing surplus clean electricity that would otherwise waste to get onto the grid.
Great but the article didn’t address how they are making up for that lost production capacity besides stating “renewables”
This is just non-sense. No general understanding of principals, or local understanding of context.
