

Hawaii Wrestles with Vagaries of Solar Power - stefap2
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hawaii-wrestles-with-vagaries-of-solar-power-1435532277

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hspak
Wasn't the Tesla Powerwall designed to address this exact issue? It seems like
there's a pretty clear path to meeting Hawaii's all renewable energy by 2045.

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melling
Thirty years from now a lot will have changed, including battery technology.
If you buy into the singularity and exponential technology growth, it might we
wiser to not rush into any extremely costly solution now.

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pkaye
Someone posted this previously. Create a bookmark with the following contents.
Then click on it when you reach a paywall page.

javascript:location.href='[https://www.google.com/webhp?#q='](https://www.google.com/webhp?#q=')
\+ encodeURIComponent(location.href) + '&btnI=I'

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slacka
To view this site, you need to come from google.com:

1\. Go to: [https://www.google.com/](https://www.google.com/)

2\. Search "Hawaii Wrestles With Vagaries of Solar Power"

3\. Follow the first link

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tux1968
It would be nice if we didn't link to sites with a paywall.

You know... so that everyone here is able to read the content and discuss it
instead of it being limited to a subset of HN participants.

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kiba
They need a way of funding journalists, or would you rather want ads?

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tux1968
What are you talking about? They can do whatever they want. But it would be
nice if THIS site was about sharing content we can all view.

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melling
If there's something interesting worth discussing, and some people can read
the article and start the conversation, I don't see why we should skip it
because it's behind a paywall.

Here's the gist of it:

"With 21% of its power now coming from renewable sources like wind turbines
and solar panels, Hawaii has become a laboratory for those intent on
reinventing the grid. A new law mandates that renewables supply all of the
state’s electricity by 2045.

But Hawaii’s grid is already running into problems with its heavy helping of
rooftop solar and other carbon-free renewables. Among them: sudden swings in
the output of solar and wind, which force the state’s main utility to scramble
to try to keep the overall supply of power steady."

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technofiend
This is the WSJ we're talking about here: a Rupert Murdoch mouthpiece, not
some bastion of balanced reporting. Utilities have peaker units that burn
natural gas and are designed for absorbing and offsetting usage upticks.

Honestly I think Germany is a far better place to look at solar and the
problems associated with it because they have fewer hours of sunshine and many
more people, so their scale and storage problems are presumably that much
greater.

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snowwindwaves
Hawaii doesn't have natural gas plants though. The article says 70% of their
energy comes from oil. I know they have diesel and coal plants too.

They would have to build LNG terminals, pipelines, and gas fired power plants
on each island in order to use natural gas as a quickly dispatchable source of
electric power.

Each island in hawaii has it's own small electric grid. The challenge for
Hawaii is running small grids with high percentages of uncontrollable
generation.

All of Europe is interconnected, so Germany can install as many solar panels
that don't get any sunshine as they want and it is only ever going to be a
sliver of the total generation on the system. The price of electricity in
Germany is also 29 cents / kwh, 2nd highest in europe. That doesn't make it
seem like a good model to me.

