Hawaii Solar Plan

by Alain on May 19, 2015
Hawaii Solar Plan

Hawaii plans to go 100% solar by 2045. Plan includes building 8 solar farms on Oahu. They better not be the bird burner solar farms. Hawaii has many rare bird species.

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  1. strider says:
    May 19, 2015 at 17:32

    All the gadgets used to concentrate the sun’s energy from light, heat or plants will use more energy to build, install, maintain, dispose of and replace than will be returned. Not to mention the loss from transmission through miles of wire or trucking and distributing bio-fuels. Otherwise it would be a form of the mythical “perpetual motion machine”. Not “renewable”, just a scam vulnerable way to extract energy from matter that politicians seem to like. Fusion would be a better deal.

  2. Maynard says:
    May 20, 2015 at 03:57

    Actually, from a quick surface analysis (that is to say, not necessarily the final word!), this plan has potential. First, they’re talking about electricity here, not biofuel, which would be a different question. And Hawaii has the highest electric rates in the nation, about 33 cents a kWh. Solar energy is reported to cost less than that, so a transition would seem to make economic sense. And Hawaii gets good exposure to sunlight, so solar plants should be highly productive. If the solar arrays aren’t destroyed by weather, it looks like a win.

    The downside of solar is you’ve got to have backup while the sun isn’t shining. That means you either switch to another fuel at night, or you find some way to store energy. I don’t know if this is done yet on a large scale, but there’s much discussion on the latter point. No, not batteries; there aren’t enough batteries in the world. Some plans involve pumping water uphill or compressing air or storing heat; basically anything to store energy in a way that can be readily converted into electricity later.

    Even if you’ve got a good storage infrastructure, you’ve got to have some backup to deal with extended periods of cloudy days. Maintaining a major backup capacity drives up the infrastructure cost.

    Even so, on the whole, this could make sense for Hawaii if it were sensibly implemented.

  3. idaho_karen says:
    May 22, 2015 at 13:04

    Most of solar is built by the Chinese; love lining their pockets with more of our money – NOT. I also saw news a while ago that the panels have quality problems, but don’t know if this is still true..

  4. Vintageport says:
    May 22, 2015 at 23:10

    Not sure if Maynard or Karen is closer to the truth, but this I do know…I need to be sure I’m done with my vacations in Hawaii by 2044. Then it will be off to Aruba and the Cayman Islands…they have terrific assisted living facilities.

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