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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Substantial amounts of solar coming online in Hawaii, causing the utility to carefully manage additional distributed solar installs [1]. Still expensive because there is much diesel and coal generation (~2GW) left to displace.

[1] https://www.hawaiianelectric.com/clean-energy-hawaii/integra... (red = saturated local electrical infra)

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"carefully manage" aka try to retain the fossil fuel dependence at all costs. Hawaii is a microcosm of egregious mismanagement despite ideal circumstances.

I was under a similar impression, but an independent audit found that while unnecessary staffing (and associated costs) was occurring, it didn't appear that the utility was attempting to sandbag the grid transformation. There's bloat, but also legitimate progress.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/audit-of-hawaiian-electric-...

> Contrary to stakeholder criticism, Hawaiian Electric's support of Hawaii's groundbreaking 100% by 2045 renewable portfolio standard (RPS) has been strong, the audit found. "It has exceeded its mandated obligations" and criticisms "appear to be largely unfounded."

> The problem is cost, it said. Meeting the RPS and the challenge of integrating rooftop solar have led to increased workload and costs, the audit recognized. But Hawaiian Electric increased staffing "with little evidence of any business cases supporting these additions."

2045? A 30 year transition plan (since '15) sounds like doing nothing and branding it.

Only if they aren't making progress towards the goals, but they do seem to be making progress.

The progress could be just from the world changing around them (cost competitive renewables). Doing something would mean putting some skin in the climate change fight.

How would that differ from simply gradually shifting to renewables?

Why is geothermal not more prominent?

Apparently you can have too much geothermal. Their first plant got knocked offline by the 2018 eruption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puna_Geothermal_Venture

There's also this bit:

> Additional concerns and opposition to the plant have been raised by Native Hawaiians, who view all forms of volcanic activity as manifestations of the goddess Pele. To the Native Hawaiians who revere Pele, geothermal wells and energy production are a desecration of her body and spirit.

But no sun or wind gods that we need to worry about?

Probably you don't drill into sun or wind, thus not producingj any unholy disturbance to the relevant deities.

Wind turbines do locally screw with the wind, that's why you can't put them too close to each other. But it's temporary and goes away when the turbine get decommissioned, so maybe that's the difference. Or maybe the wind is traditionally meant to be harnessed (boats) but volcanic energy is not?

It is used on the Big Island, which is the newest island. Unfortunately most people live on the older islands, which aren't above the volcanic hotspot anymore. And the islands are far enough apart that they all have their own independent electrical grids.

Even if they ain't directly on the hot spot, couldn't they still be close enough to it for there to be a useful temperature differential?

There were attempts to use the ocean for a heat sorce/sink for downtown AC.

Are there any realistic power generation options from tidal/ocean power? Seems like that might be great for Hawaii — if it isn’t still the realm of science fiction?

It’s still impossible to do on a practical basis.

Fortunately there are still people working on it.

Most tidal I am familiar with capable of generating anything approaching reasonable amounts causes significant ecosystem impacts- you basically replace entire shorelines with concrete bunkers that act as a crappy gravity battery (you can get significant mass from the water, but not much lift from the tide).

I think most research is focused on utilizing less unique space- rooftops, open plains, open ocean. Shorelines are tiny spaces for how ecologically unique they are, plus they tend to be highly desirable for other human uses as well.

I saw a marketing video for one company that was deploying a prototype to do this a few days ago. I'm unable to remember the name or find a link.

I think it was somewhere in oceania that they were installing the protoype in. The unit looked sort of like (this)[https://imgur.com/a/ymulbWF] but wider and in hd of course.

By wider I mean it looked more like a catamaran style boat and the one in the imgur link is more like a monohull boat. The one in the video which they deployed maybe 15-30 yards off shore from a beach was where they installed it and it had branding from their company on the side and some bright yellow accents.

Hawaii is actually pretty worse case for tidal power. You want a narrow estuary with a high tidal swing. Think fjords and similar formations.

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