A huge battery has replaced Hawaii’s last coal plant::undefined
The child in me just wants there to be a larger-than-life D-cell battery looming on the horizon.
A huge battery has replaced Hawaii's last coal plant
Submitted 10 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
Comments
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 10 months ago
blandfordforever@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Hawaii, I hope you all got that larger than life D.
Da_Boom@iusearchlinux.fyi 9 months ago
The question is, what brand? Duracell?, Eveready?, Energizer?
Oh my pkcell…
thesorehead@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Pkcell for sure. Just be careful with your dingus!
StefanT@lemmy.world 9 months ago
It reads “158 Tesla Megapacks”. But yeah, these could contain Duracell :D
NickwithaC@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Eneloop
Fridgeratr@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The fabled Z cell
Colour_me_triggered@lemm.ee 10 months ago
Why did Hawaii have coal plants to start with? The place is literally made of volcanoes!
DaCrazyJamez@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
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.
paholg@lemm.ee 9 months ago
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.
andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
Ohana means coal industry.
NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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 :-)
DoomBot5@lemmy.world 10 months ago
They didn’t say react all at once. I bet you it’s a much slower ramp up.
OriginalUsername7@lemmy.world 10 months ago
“I cast lightning bolt”
Flicks switch
Amir@lemmy.ml 9 months ago
I tap two islands…
Motavader@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
rockSlayer@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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
DoomBot5@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
obinice@lemmy.world 10 months ago
How much electricity do the batteries produce vs the previous power plant?
SlopppyEngineer@lemmy.world 9 months ago
None. But still it gives power when it’s dark and solar panels stop producing power. It’s a miracle.
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
_Analog_@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.)
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 9 months ago
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.
LesserAbe@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
antimongo@lemmy.world 9 months ago
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.
Serinus@lemmy.world 10 months ago
I’d rather have brownouts, and I don’t think either is likely.
TropicalDingdong@lemmy.world 9 months ago
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.
BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world 10 months ago
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.
Lmaydev@programming.dev 10 months ago
I assume they used to fire up the coal plant to fill gaps but now use the battery which stores excess energy generated.
disablist@lemdro.id 10 months ago
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…
blandfordforever@lemm.ee 10 months ago
They are stored solar energy! Releasing the energy also unfortunately releases the carbon into the atmosphere.
ironeagl@sh.itjust.works 10 months ago
No, the plant is full of primary batteries! 4.2 million AA cells!
weew@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
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.
eager_eagle@lemmy.world 10 months ago
all our “energy production” just converts energy from one state into another