...looking forward to the day when Tesla can supply solar power to the island of Hawaii and the State of Hawaii someday...

Let's hope the technology proves reliable enough that it can be installed in a diffuse way, solar panels on rooftops and over parking lots, etc., with the individual battery boxes tucked away in unobtrusive places.

In other words, put the power closer to where it's being used.

...totally agree..!!

Hawaii is already littered with so called "renewable energy" junk that is rotting away.

Broken Promises: Hawaii Free Press.

This is a huge amount of land for a trivial amount of energy.

This crap will be landfill in twenty years, and no one will be cheering for it.

Of course the U.S. Navy has "portable" nuclear power plants regularly parked in Hawaii in the form of ships and submarines.

I suppose a nuclear power plant could be built and run by Navy trained personnel, and then the islands could all be linked up with undersea HVDC cables... Hah, hah, stop making sense. Fossil fuels are "natural."

It's just too damned easy to buy a modern diesel power plant. Write a check to Caterpillar or one of its competitors and they'll drop one on your driveway, ready to go, sophisticated power control systems already installed.

A diesel power plant with the equivalent capacity of Tesla's ugly Hawaiian solar plant occupies less space than those battery boxes alone.

Another ongoing "renewable" energy junkyard in Hawaii is OTEC. They've been trying to make that work for many decades. The latest experimental plant produces only 100 kilowatts, and it's yet another ugly expensive thing.



That's just the plant; not included is all the pipe that will probably be left littering the undersea landscape when this plant closes.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hawaii-first-to-harness-deep-ocean-temperatures-for-power/

Here's a 100 kw diesel generator for comparison:



http://www.generac.com/industrial/products/diesel-generators

My own Luddite views are not likely to be accepted by most Hawaiian residents. First you get rid of fossil fueled vehicles... like that's going to happen anytime soon.

Hiring some Icelandic geothermal power experts seems like a reasonable thing to do, but there's huge NIMBY resistance to that too, for the same religious reasons things like telescopes are opposed, and because the fossil fuel industry is so deeply entrenched in post World War II Hawaii. Huge amounts of oil are imported for the military, airlines, and automobiles, so it's no stretch to use it for power generation too. All the infrastructure for oil imports exists and it's not going away.

Last edited Tue Mar 14, 2017, 05:54 PM - Edit history (2)

They are small and portable and work pretty well. I'm referring of course to the submarines and air craft carriers of the Nimitz class.

One of the skill sets we still have in the United States is building nuclear ships.

(There is no intrinsic reason that we can't build nuclear freighters - shipping is responsible for a small, but highly significant portion of the 36 billion tons of carbon dioxide we dump into the atmosphere.)

For many years, I was a big reactor kind of guy, but I've changed my mind.

The Pacific Islands in general are an excellent place for these kind of reactors, small reactors. In the swords to ploughshares mode, the US Navy has published some intriguing research on the recovery of carbon dioxide (as carbonate) from seawater for the in situ synthesis of jet fuels.

Development of an Electrochemical Acidification Cell for the Recovery of CO2 and H2 from Seawater (Ind. Eng. Chem. Res., 2011, 50 (17), pp 9876–9882).

Hydrogen and carbon oxides are the starting materials for Fischer-Tropsch chemistry and in theory, one could make any product found in petroleum using this chemistry. (A better idea than synthetic gasoline or diesel fuel would be the "wonder fuel" dimethyl ether, but that's another matter.)

Nuclear powered electrolysis would be closed carbon dioxide cycling, devoid of any climate impacts. In theory, it could be performed on any island to make local transportation fuel.

It's lab scale, but interesting, probably not at the point of "intriguing" but definitely interesting.

If one wanted to make transportation fuels for use on island nations, one could do so with a nuclear power plant, particularly a high temperature "breed and burn" plant designed to operate without refueling for half a century or more.

I believe that it may fall to future generations to make a serious effort to remove the dangerous fossil fuel waste we dumped on them while we waited for the Godot wind and solar nirvana that never comes. This may not be technically feasible, removing carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere by technologically advanced means, but has not been shown to be technically impossible either. It is, of course, a profound thermodynamic challenge, although plants do it, mostly by having a self replicating means of producing large surface areas. Having a use for the carbon dioxide is a key to making any such processes viable.

Over the years in my library research I've convinced myself that if this is possible by any means, it will certainly involve seawater. It concentrates carbon dioxide quite well, and in fact, represents a major carbon dioxide sink, either as carbonate in solution or as plankton.

To the extent the carbon dioxide so captured is utilized to make advanced materials such as graphene -but certainly not limited to graphene - and polymers, it will represent carbon sequestration, probably not as effective as the sequestration that would have taken place were we to simply leave dangerous fossil fuels in the ground, but something, better than nothing.