When is a battery cheaper than a power plant?

[Sunking]

Also, I'm not sure where you're getting 0.36% of Hawaii's electric generation from solar. According to the EIA data, in 2014 Hawaii got 0.48% of its utility-generated power from solar

You are joking right? What difference is .48 to .36% It means the exact same thing that solar does not have any significant contribution. FWIW I got the info from Hawaii Electric Light Fuel Mix

[SunEagle]

Wow! 0.48% or an increase of 0.12% - still insignificant.

I believe that overall figure of 0.48% is for all of the Hawaiian islands but in some communities the amount of home installed PV has increased the generation to 50% which is why the POCO's had put a stop to all new installations.

Now the news I read last week states that all of the PV install requests in the backlog will be approved (or at least reviewed again) by the end of April. Part of the HECO decisions to move forward to allow home pv systems has to do with local energy storage being more practical and with Smart Meters allow HECO to keep the voltage and frequency on a feeder more in balance.

[J.P.M.]

If you go back to the beginning of the thread you will find links to a couple of studies looking at the economics of grid storage in California and Texas.

SunEagle wondered if the economic analysis would be comparable in Hawaii.

And that is why we are comparing Hawaii to Texas.

Also, I'm not sure where you're getting 0.36% of Hawaii's electric generation from solar. According to the EIA data, in 2014 Hawaii got 0.48% of its utility-generated power from solar, excluding residential solar and commercial installations under 1MW.

0.36% to 0.48% could be different years or simply an error. Either way, bringing it up seems about equal to, and about as productive as trying to separating fly crap from pepper.

[russ]

Also, I'm not sure where you're getting 0.36% of Hawaii's electric generation from solar. According to the EIA data, in 2014 Hawaii got 0.48% of its utility-generated power from solar, excluding residential solar and commercial installations under 1MW.

Wow! 0.48% or an increase of 0.12% - still insignificant.

[pleppik]

Texas? Where are you getting TX from? TX is the worlds largest RE producer in the world, but to my knowledge doe snot use batteries to store wind power to be used during peak.

While it is true fuel has to be shipped in and is expensive, but same holds true for batteries. With Solar only contributing .36% I cannot see how storing battery power would change that other than make it more inefficient.

You could charge at night from conventional sources to release during peak. Is that what you mean?

If you go back to the beginning of the thread you will find links to a couple of studies looking at the economics of grid storage in California and Texas.

SunEagle wondered if the economic analysis would be comparable in Hawaii.

And that is why we are comparing Hawaii to Texas.

Also, I'm not sure where you're getting 0.36% of Hawaii's electric generation from solar. According to the EIA data, in 2014 Hawaii got 0.48% of its utility-generated power from solar, excluding residential solar and commercial installations under 1MW.

[Sunking]

but I'm pretty sure the island's power economics are very different than in California or Texas.

Texas? Where are you getting TX from? TX is the worlds largest RE producer in the world, but to my knowledge doe snot use batteries to store wind power to be used during peak.

While it is true fuel has to be shipped in and is expensive, but same holds true for batteries. With Solar only contributing .36% I cannot see how storing battery power would change that other than make it more inefficient.

You could charge at night from conventional sources to release during peak. Is that what you mean?

[pleppik]

Real easy to find out, depends on which Island you are talking about. Lumping all Islands from all sources together you get.



Conventional

• Diesel 71.9%
• Coal 14.38*

Renewable

• Wind 5.28%
• Solid Waste 3.92%
• Geothermal 2.95%
• Biomass .43%
• Hydro .42%
• Solar .36%
• Bio Fuels .31%

Conventional Total = 86.28%
Renewable Total = 13.72%

That's interesting and useful, but it doesn't actually tells us what the relative costs of those sources are. Hawaii doesn't have any fossil fuel reserves of its own, so all that coal and diesel has to be shipped halfway across the Pacific Ocean and is presumably more expensive than on the mainland.

One of the key factors in determining if it's cost-effective for a utility to install big batteries is the cost difference between generating base power and peak power. If the cost difference is small, then the batteries aren't going to pay for themselves. And I don't know what the cost difference is in Hawaii, but I'm pretty sure the island's power economics are very different than in California or Texas.

[Sunking]

My understanding is that part of the reason electricity is so expensive in Hawaii is that they have to import all their fuel and so they don't have much cheap base power.

Real easy to find out, depends on which Island you are talking about. Lumping all Islands from all sources together you get.



Conventional

• Diesel 71.9%
• Coal 14.38*

Renewable

• Wind 5.28%
• Solid Waste 3.92%
• Geothermal 2.95%
• Biomass .43%
• Hydro .42%
• Solar .36%
• Bio Fuels .31%

Conventional Total = 86.28%
Renewable Total = 13.72%

[pleppik]

With the cost of electricity so high in Hawaii and the high percentage of solar pv installations I wonder if the battery "break even" cost is higher than the $15000/kWh for the CA study which would make it easier to justify with local energy storage systems.

Interesting question, but I don't know if it has an obvious answer. A lot of the payoff for utility-scale batteries in California and Texas comes from substituting cheap base power for expensive peaking power. My understanding is that part of the reason electricity is so expensive in Hawaii is that they have to import all their fuel and so they don't have much cheap base power.

[Sunking]

Especially with old nuclear plants that apparently can't be throttled..

Very ignorant statement. That is why people are so scared about nuclear power is they are completely ignorant and have been fed disinformation by the likes of people like you aka Fear Mongers.

If you cannot control the reaction it is called a BOMB and goes BOOM. Any reactor can be throttled or else they go into thermal runaway. You guys may not like it but nuclear power is the only real answer to electric generation. Just a matter of short time before generation capacity hits a wall creating a crisis, laws change, and we start building plant as fast as we can.

[J.P.M.]

Especially with old nuclear plants that apparently can't be throttled. EVs are one way to implement overnight battery storage, of course. Batteries replacing liquid fuel looks pretty good when the baseload is old nuclear baseload.

I'm not a big an of nukes, but on throttling it's not quite that simple. All power generation systems can be throttled or modulated, some have more or less flexibility as f(time) and process requirements. For one thing, if they couldn't be throttled, they couldn't be shut down.

[donald]

Utilities looking to time shift waste base line power are an immense market - one with money even.

Especially with old nuclear plants that apparently can't be throttled. EVs are one way to implement overnight battery storage, of course. Batteries replacing liquid fuel looks pretty good when the baseload is old nuclear baseload.

[DanKegel]

Pardon? Not enough of a market to bother with.

Maybe you're right there.

Here's a year-old article about utilities and storage subsidies:
http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059996345
It said e.g. New York planned to offer subsidies of $2,100 a kilowatt for up to 100MW (sic) distributed battery storage, and California is planning 1.3 GW (sic) of utility-scale storage by 2020.
Units aside, those sound like large numbers.

[russ]

Looks like one Hawaiian power company is refusing to sign up new net metered customers?http://www.hsea.org/_literature_2223..._to_Commission

That ought to light a fire under storage.

Pardon? Not enough of a market to bother with.

Utilities looking to time shift waste base line power are an immense market - one with money even.

[DanKegel]

Looks like one Hawaiian power company is refusing to sign up new net metered customers?http://www.hsea.org/_literature_2223..._to_Commission

That ought to light a fire under storage.