Hawaii has 37 power plants?!

[Matthiasa]

Being in power generation myself this is pretty interesting, but doesn't make sense. For example.. Hana Substation is shown as 2MW. However when you click on it, it shows two IC units at 1kW each. 2x1kW=2kW=/=2MW. I've never even heard of an IC unit being 1kW. That's basically nothing after I2R losses, etc. Am I missing something?

I'm not surprised that all of these plants are 20,30,50 years old. Of all the plants and stations I've been at, 90% of them are rust buckets. It's amazing the grid even works (I didn't say that...). No one wants to dump money into power stations anymore, they just keep patching shit to run another 5 years. I guess it's only providing you electricity - no big deal. Everyone is all about 'going green' or the classic NIMBY folks but are buying the latest and greatest shit out there that sucks energy like there's no tomorrow. Yea.... solar panels. Or WINDMILLS! We'll only need 500 million acres to provide the same amount of power an LM6000 may provide.

No a single LM6000 does not provide on the order of 7,812,500 MW of output...
Its actually output could be matched assuming say a 33% capacity factor then ~100 standard size wind turbine will be needed. Note that other activities such as agriculture can be done around said turbines.

 

[Bacstar]

I work for a landfill and we have this to help power the army/airforce base here in Alaska:

http://www.muni.org/Departments/SWS/Pages/AnchLandfillGastoEnergyPrj.aspx

 

[balloonshark]

I wonder if these new bladeless wind turbines will take up less space? http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/vortex-bladeless-wind-turbine-indiegogo/

 

[Red Squirrel]

Omg that site was annoying. I got bombarded with 2 freaking gray out javascript popups and I only had a chance to read 2 paragraphs. Gave up. People who code that shit should be stoned to death. Those "bladeless" turbines look cool though. Guessing it's like a squirrel cage turbine internally.

We do need to add more solar and wind power to the grid though and eventually phase out fossil fuel. It can be done, it's just the oil companies don't want it to happen so it will always be a fight. There may be drawbacks to wind and solar such as lack of consistency, but that just means we need to put more effort towards storage plants. With existing tech that could consist of very large in situ lead acid batteries. I'm talking large plastic dumpster sized containers filled with lead plates and acid, in large strings to get a decent voltage, then multiple of these in parallel. Even telecom batteries (ours are like 4800 amp hours per cell, we have 2 strings of 24 cells) would be too small for grid application.

Where I live I think all the power is hydro electric. It's actually kind of neat as if you follow the transmission lines on google maps you can eventually find the dams that feed them.

 

[MongGrel]

I haven't even been to Hawaii in decades, they even had many large wind generated fans way back in 1980 or so up.

Hawaii has always seemed a pretty progressive test bed for all kinds of things.

 

[squirrel dog]

glad I am not the guy to replace the airplane lights atop " The Towers of Messina "

 

[Mixolydian]

I work for a landfill and we have this to help power the army/airforce base here in Alaska:



http://www.muni.org/Departments/SWS/Pages/AnchLandfillGastoEnergyPrj.aspx

They have quite a few of those around here too

 

[Leyawiin]

Its not really surprising. Geographically discontinuous, no mainland power grid, system built piecemeal over a 100+ years providing power to plantations and isolated communities. With the exception of Oahu (Honolulu) the Hawaiian Islands are rural. If you look at that list the bulk of power is being produced at a half dozen stations on Oahu (where 1,000,000 people live on 600 sq miles). Even though its urban for the most part and could probably be served by fewer stations it may be more reliable to break it up into 6-8 stations.

 

[John Connor]

I work for a landfill and we have this to help power the army/airforce base here in Alaska:

http://www.muni.org/Departments/SWS/Pages/AnchLandfillGastoEnergyPrj.aspx

Driving from DIA (Denver) on the off beaten path there is a large land fill and there is a large about 5 foot wide pipe with what looks like gases coming off it. I can't believe a land fill produces that much gas!

 

[John Connor]

I wonder if these new bladeless wind turbines will take up less space? http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/vortex-bladeless-wind-turbine-indiegogo/

Is this company publicly traded? This is great because I hear a lot of news of birds being killed by wind turbines including bald eagles.

 

[cabri]

Is this company publicly traded? This is great because I hear a lot of news of birds being killed by wind turbines including bald eagles.

There is a similar startup outside of Denver that is doing this type of concept.

 

[l0cke]

Is this company publicly traded? This is great because I hear a lot of news of birds being killed by wind turbines including bald eagles.

Well you can fund them, in exchange for a hat or a tshirt

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/vortex-bladeless-a-wind-generator-without-blades--3#/story

 

[bunnyfubbles]

500 million acres you say? No problem.

yeah, we already fill it with garbage and chemicals and overfish it like crazy, FUCK THE OCEAN! amirite!?

in all seriousness, a tiny farm like that is ok, but I'm against the environmental impacts that come with any sort of aggressive expansion of wind/water energy. Rooftop solar and nuclear is the way to go

 

[MongGrel]

Its not really surprising. Geographically discontinuous, no mainland power grid, system built piecemeal over a 100+ years providing power to plantations and isolated communities. With the exception of Oahu (Honolulu) the Hawaiian Islands are rural. If you look at that list the bulk of power is being produced at a half dozen stations on Oahu (where 1,000,000 people live on 600 sq miles). Even though its urban for the most part and could probably be served by fewer stations it may be more reliable to break it up into 6-8 stations.

I'd imagine 1 million would be a small estimate these days, but haven't looked up Hawaii stats in a long time.

My bad, it is just shy of that.

I think we have that many just in Pinellas County down here.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinellas_County,_Florida

 

[rcpratt]

Is this company publicly traded? This is great because I hear a lot of news of birds being killed by wind turbines including bald eagles.

Of all the complaints about various power sources, wind turbines killing birds has got to be the dumbest. They're birds. There's no free lunch with energy.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Of all the complaints about various power sources, wind turbines killing birds has got to be the dumbest. They're birds. There's no free lunch with energy.

Yeah I hate that some people are actually against turbines for that reason. Because fossil fuel is that much better for nature. A single oil spill probably kills way more animals than all the turbines in the country combined kill during the same time of the spill. I could be wrong here, and too lazy to research that, but it seems reasonable to me. It would actually make an interesting study actually.

I really think if it was not for the politics and corruption involving governments and the oil industry we could fully move to renewables. Take all the money and effort that goes into tar sands and pipelines and put it towards R&D of utility grade energy storage, and building more wind turbines and thermal and/or PV solar plants. Of course hydro dams play a big part of the grid already, keep those and maybe build more, though solar and wind is probably less impacting, but dams are also needed to control water flows to prevent flooding anyway so they do serve multiple purposes.